How to Tell If Your Finance Team Has a Workflow Problem

There’s plenty of activity in a finance team, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the workflow is working well. Warning signs tend to appear when workarounds, hand-offs and delays become routine. Missed deadlines, an overreliance on one individual for certain tasks, new hires who take an age to get up to speed, and a general lack of visibility into what’s outstanding are all signs of finance workflow bottlenecks.

Signs That Your Finance Team Has a Workflow Problem

These issues aren’t caused by a lack of effort. More often, they indicate that the way the team handles work needs attention. The first step in any finance process improvement is to find out where and why work comes to a standstill and what’s required to get it moving again.

1. A Pattern Of Missed Deadlines

An occasional late submission is no cause for concern, but a recurring delay is. Finance teams have their own set of deadlines to contend with: month-end close, payroll, tax, supplier payments and similar tasks. When these are habitually late, the problem is as much about organisation as workload.

A deadline can slip for a number of reasons. Perhaps information was slow to come from another department, or an approval is waiting in an inbox, or a reconciliation is incomplete. It could be that responsibility isn’t well-defined, or that staff have to manually compile data from various sources. The question isn’t just why the deadline wasn’t met, but what happened beforehand.

In fact, process improvement has already been made an operational priority for many. A 2025 survey of 54 CFOs and other finance leaders in Australia reported an average priority score of 7.7 out of 10 for process improvement for the coming year, with routine closing and reporting close behind at 7.4. This shows that the issue is about more than technology. Should the same deadline be missed each month, it’s worth mapping the process backwards to identify the bottleneck.

2. Only One Person Has The Answer

When a task depends on the knowledge of a single employee, the process becomes vulnerable. Whether it’s the person who knows how to run the right report before month-end or the only one who can reconcile a given account, specialist knowledge is an asset. But if the rest of the team can’t manage without them, there’s a problem.

If that individual were away tomorrow, could someone else take over the task from the available documentation? If not, the dependency needs to be addressed. Create a process map that sets out the sequence, the inputs, the approvals and the expected output. It doesn’t have to be lengthy; it should simply be clear to someone unfamiliar with the work.

The National AI Centre advises documenting who’s responsible for each step and how long each step takes, while also looking for rework, manual entry, and information gaps. Such mapping has value even without plans for automation.

3. Too Much Time Spent On Email

Email itself isn’t the problem, but using it as the primary tool for managing ongoing finance work is. Consider a monthly reporting cycle: an email is sent to a few managers, then a reminder, then a follow-up after only partial information is received. The actual work may take only minutes, but the follow-up takes much longer.

This is a clear sign of a bottleneck. The work is held up not by the task itself, but by the next person not providing the necessary input or approval. A sounder workflow will make outstanding actions easy to see, with every task having a status and an owner. Let automatic reminders handle routine follow-ups where you can. Automation should be about reducing predictable administrative work, not accountability.

4. Lack Of Visibility

It shouldn’t be necessary to dig through inboxes to understand what’s happening. Can the team readily say what’s awaiting approval? Some basic questions need to be answered: what reconciliation is still outstanding, which report hasn’t been finished, who’s responsible for it, and how long has the task been waiting? If one has to ask people individually or search through spreadsheets and emails to find out, there’s a lack of visibility.

The National AI Centre recommends looking at a process end-to-end and documenting each step, including the inputs and outputs, the time involved, and the person responsible. They also suggest you ask where work tends to be delayed. This can reveal a bottleneck that’s otherwise difficult to identify.

Take the example of 20 tasks that are marked “in progress”, yet 15 of them have been waiting for approval for days. The problem isn’t that the finance team is slow; the workflow has created a bottleneck. This distinction helps separate a true capacity issue from a process issue. You won’t fix a matter of work that’s consistently waiting on approval by simply adding another person to the finance department.

5. It Takes New Staff Months To Get Up To Speed

Training is, of course, a process, but a new hire shouldn’t be left to figure out the details of the finance function through trial and error and constant questioning. When they’re spending their first few months trying to determine the order of operations or who approves things, the documentation is likely lacking. This is particularly true in a growing team where undocumented procedures mean institutional knowledge has to be passed on verbally.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 35% of Australian businesses experienced a skills shortage in 2024–25, with financial skills cited by 6% of businesses. Among businesses experiencing skills shortages, 57% said specialist skills or knowledge were required.

While a written workflow won’t cure a skills deficit, it helps the new employee avoid building process knowledge from scratch.

An effective onboarding routine provides a framework so the individual doesn’t have to work everything out from scratch. It should make clear what initiates the process, what’s needed in terms of information and checks, who’s responsible for each task and who has final say. It should also set out what the output should look like and how to handle anything unusual.

What Ties These Signs Together?

At first the signs may seem unrelated, but they usually come from the same underlying issue: work moving through the finance function without a defined process. Missed deadlines are a sign of delay; a single point of failure means knowledge isn’t documented; poor visibility means there’s no effective tracking. So any finance process improvement effort should start with the workflow, not with buying new software.

Document the process from start to finish. Note the ownership, the data required and where work is delayed. See if the trouble is due to unclear lines of responsibility or excessive manual handling.

Where Does Automation Come In?

Only once you understand the process should you consider finance workflow automation for the predictable parts of it. Routine matters like approval routing, validation and status updates are suitable for automation. But leave complex decisions and exceptions to human review.

The National AI Centre’s guidance states that you must understand and refine the process before you decide where technology should be used. Automating a bad workflow only makes the problem happen faster.

To get started, pick a process that’s a regular source of frustration and document it. Look for duplicated work, unnecessary approvals or tasks that are hard to track. A finance team doesn’t need to eliminate all manual work, but the aim is to have a system in which responsibilities and deadlines are clear, and the right information reaches the right person. With that foundation, technology can be a support rather than a substitute for a well-designed process.