Today’s business leaders are demanding more from their accounting teams, yet these teams lack the time and resources to deliver due to a mountain of manual, repetitive tasks. According to new research from the Cloud-based purchase-to-pay (P2P) automation provider Yooz, only one in three finance professionals are able to meet the rising expectations of C-suite leaders–leading to escalating frustration and tension across the organization.

The 2024 Yooz Survey: Leaders vs. Ledgers was conducted for Yooz by the third-party platform Pollfish. To understand the misalignment and its impact on organizational success, Yooz asked C-suite leaders and finance professionals a series of questions identifying discrepancies between their views and opportunities for greater alignment.

The results expose numerous points of dissonance between leadership expectations and on-the-ground realities faced by finance teams. While the C-suite wants more strategic guidance from finance, teams feel bogged down by manual, repetitive tasks. And although the report indicates that leaders recognize the strategic voice finance can provide, finance professionals don't feel like their impact is realized or acknowledged by leaders. But both groups were strongly aligned on the solution: that automation holds the key to unlocking finance's strategic potential.

Key findings include:

• While C-suite executives expect finance teams to dedicate a significant portion of their time to strategic initiatives, only 33% of finance teams reported being able to meet this expectation, underscoring a major gap between leadership's expectations and the operational reality.
• Finance teams feel their ability to provide strategic value is hindered by a lack of recognition and understanding of the daily operational challenges they face, with 77% reporting frustration with leadership’s lack of operational awareness.
• There’s a discrepancy in the perceived primary role of finance teams; business leaders voiced the expectation of receiving strategic guidance from finance, whereas finance teams believe they are primarily tasked with transaction processing.
• While the majority of respondents spend at least 4 hours per week chasing down documents and approvals, nearly a quarter of them said they spend 7 or more hours per week on this task.
• While 64% of C-suite executives believe finance teams are effective in influencing strategic decisions, only 50% of finance professionals feel that their strategic input has a real impact, highlighting a disconnect in perceptions within the organization.
• Both C-suite and finance teams see automation as a critical solution, with a strong consensus that embracing technology to automate repetitive tasks would greatly enhance the strategic capabilities of finance teams.

Yooz’s CEO Laurent Charpentier explains, “Our study illuminates the harsh truth that misalignment between executives and finance teams is standing in the way of organizational success. By embracing automation, teams can finally move beyond manual busywork and leverage technology to enable strategic decision making and direction that executives expect and need to drive the business forward.”

The 2024 Yooz Survey: Leaders vs. Ledgers was conducted in May 2024 by Pollfish, surveying 600 U.S. business professionals over the age of 18, comprised of 300 C-suite leaders and 300 finance professionals with annual household incomes of at least $50,000.