Companies often hand document automation to IT too early. Poor document processes quickly become finance problems. Contracts, invoices, approvals, supplier records and compliance evidence affect reporting, cash flow, controls and risk.
When information is scattered across inboxes, shared drives and legacy systems, reporting slows, payments are delayed and audits become harder. The business can also struggle to prove who approved what, when and which version of a record supported the decision.
Ilse Potgieter, finance manager at Ricoh South Africa, says finance should be involved from the start. “Finance sees where the process is breaking down. Before we choose technology, we need to be clear about the problem we are solving and what the system needs to do,” she says.
A 2025 finance survey shows how heavily emerging finance use cases rely on clean information. Among finance functions that have implemented AI, 49% use it for knowledge management, 37% for accounts payable automation and 34% for error and anomaly detection. Each depends on reliable records and structured workflows.
The warning signs are practical. Documents are hard to find. Approvals depend on manual follow-up, while teams may be working from different versions of the same record. “A system can digitise a process, but it cannot define the problem for you,” Potgieter says. “If you do not understand where work is slowing down or information is being lost, you risk automating the same weak process.”
The people who use the process every day should also be involved because they see where hand-offs fail and controls create friction.
AI raises the stakes because it depends on the quality, structure and governance of the information it can access. The South African Generative AI Roadmap 2025 found that GenAI adoption among large enterprises increased from 45% in 2024 to 67% in 2025. Yet only 14% of organisations had a formal company-wide GenAI strategy.
Employees are already using AI to search, summarise, draft and analyse business information. Weak document controls can expose sensitive data, treat outdated records as current and produce outputs that are difficult to verify. Finance therefore needs to know which records are authoritative, who owns them, who can access them and what evidence supports a decision.
For finance and accounting leaders, document automation affects compliance, audit readiness and management information. Technology teams may implement the platform. Finance still needs to own the business outcome. “The objective goes beyond moving documents faster,” Potgieter says. “It is about improving control and making the information behind decisions easier to trust.”