The illusion of progress: Why “automated” finance tools still run on human duct tape

Finance teams aren’t lacking in activity. From bookkeeping, journal entries and invoice processing to reconciliations and reporting, there’s always something in motion. Yet despite all the hustle, progress often feels out of reach.

The real problem? Manual work hasn’t disappeared; it’s just been reshuffled into bottlenecks that delay more strategic work.

In many cases, automation efforts have only shifted time-consuming accounting and finance tasks from one format to another. A spreadsheet becomes a shared dashboard. An email approval becomes a routed task. But your finance team is still stuck chasing numbers, rekeying data and resolving issues after the fact — all of which hinder decision making.

The result is a constant state of motion without momentum and no cost savings to show for it.

The human duct tape holding it all together

Across many finance departments, people have quietly become the connectors between systems that don’t integrate, business processes that don’t scale and tools that don’t talk to each other. This work is often hidden, but it’s everywhere.

Manual transfers still dominate

It’s common for financial data to be passed manually between accounting systems, cloud-based tools and spreadsheets. Reformatting templates, copying journal entries, extracting expense reports and uploading to ERP and other core systems are all daily habits. But they aren’t strategic; they’re fragile and expose gaps in finance processes.

Instead of enabling financial automation, these patterns create process gaps that rely on individuals to hold things together.

Email is the approval workflow

Approvals for purchase orders, reimbursements or journal corrections often live in inboxes. There’s no standardized tracking, no built-in audit trail and no ability to scale. Delays compound, and time-sensitive tasks get buried in threads with no visibility into who owes what to whom, which is an inefficiency that hurts accountability.

Errors hide in plain sight

Manual data entry, repetitive tasks and disconnected handoffs make room for mistakes. Small discrepancies lead to larger rework — sometimes noticed too late to avoid compliance issues or reporting misstatements. Even one error in invoice processing or forecasting can distort financial results.

Finance teams often absorb these mistakes silently and patch over them to keep things moving. But the impact is real: lost time, lost trust and missed opportunities.

What real automation looks like

True finance automation software doesn’t just wrap manual processes in nicer interfaces. It eliminates the work entirely. When you’re ready to truly automate your financial operations, evaluate your team’s foundation, platform, metrics and methods.

Fix the foundation

Automation done right starts by removing handoffs instead of just digitizing them. That means getting rid of emails, templates, offline trackers and error-prone spreadsheets, not layering new tools on top of them.

Unify the platform

Use a unified finance automation platform, like Finance Automation by Redwood, that streamlines your processes for you. It’s designed to replace the manual duct tape with a single, unified solution. It connects the entire finance lifecycle, such as journal entries, validations, invoice approvals, reconciliations and financial close, into one streamlined system while improving visibility.

Instead of moving data manually between tools, Finance Automation integrates directly with ERPs, CRMs and other business systems via APIs. It accesses data in real time, automates the transformation steps that normally happen in spreadsheets and initiates downstream accounting and financial processes automatically, so no bots or workarounds are required.

That means your team won’t need to cleanse Excel files just to make them automation-ready. There’ll be no back-and-forth with IT to get a new workflow running — just intelligent automation that’s purpose-built for accounting and finance functions.

Automate the middle, not just the edges

Many finance automation solutions focus on what happens at the beginning or end of a process. One example of this is automating invoice intake or reporting disclosures. But the real time is spent in the middle by formatting files, validating values, routing approvals and chasing down exceptions.

Finance Automation addresses these middle steps, where your accounting and finance teams lose the most time, require the most manual effort and introduce the most risk. It doesn’t just trigger actions; it transforms how your work flows.

Intelligent controls without the complexity

Finance Automation includes built-in internal controls, audit trails and SLA tracking with a user-friendly interface that doesn’t require coding. Artificial intelligence and machine learning can detect anomalies, recommend corrections and reduce reliance on tribal knowledge by combining AI with automation technology to increase efficiency.

This allows your finance department to scale without scaling headcount. It’s automation that adjusts to real business needs, not the other way around.

Movement isn’t the same as momentum

Procuring new finance automation tools is easy. Getting real ROI from them is harder.

If spreadsheets still drive month-end close, if manual tasks still dominate onboarding or procurement or if human error is still part of your team’s weekly routine, the illusion of progress has taken hold.

Real automation delivers more than dashboards. It delivers control, speed and clarity. It enables informed decisions and measurable performance improvements. Most of all, it frees up your team to focus on value instead of firefighting.

Where to begin

The first step is to look honestly at your current accounting and finance processes. Ask whether these tools help you optimize outcomes or simply keep things moving.

• Are manual approvals still clogging email inboxes?
• Is data copied between systems by hand?
• Do dashboards reflect real-time updates or just snapshots?
• Are audit trails automated or assembled post-close?

If the answers point to hidden manual work, it’s time to question whether your existing tools are still running on human duct tape.

Don’t just add more finance tools. Remove the unnecessary work.

The goal isn’t to digitize more steps. It’s to eliminate the ones that shouldn’t exist at all.

Finance Automation is a solution that’s built to do exactly that. It replaces fragmented, repetitive and error-prone financial tasks with fully automated systems that handle end-to-end processes — from journal entry to reconciliation to intercompany.

With seamless integration, real-time dashboards and scalable infrastructure, it’s designed to keep accounting and finance operations running without the duct tape.

Evaluate your current financial tools to see if they’re truly helping you progress or just keeping you and your team busy. Then, book a demo to see how you can create a fully automated finance close.