Finance Transformation
The Three-Tier Problem: Why Finance Automation Projects Miss the Point
1 September 2025
Finance automation projects usually start with a symptom. Reconciliations are late. Month-end takes too long. The auditors have flagged the same control weakness for the third year running. Someone decides the answer is a better system and commissions a project. This is the same pattern behind most ERP implementation failures.
The project addresses the symptom. The underlying problem survives.
I have designed and delivered finance automation across commercial and public sector environments. The most useful thing I learned: usually by getting it wrong first: is that finance process failures are almost never single-layer problems. They are three-layer problems. And fixing only one layer while ignoring the other two is why automation projects deliver less than they promised.
The three layers
Layer one: the system.
Sometimes the technology genuinely is inadequate. It cannot do what the process requires. Data cannot flow between platforms. Reconciliation has to happen manually because there is no integration between the bank feed and the accounts system. Getting systems integration right is a genuine technology problem. This layer is the most visible and the most comfortable to address, because it feels like a problem with a defined solution.
Layer two: the process.
More often than the system is a problem, the process is a problem. Nobody designed it deliberately. It evolved: a workaround added here, a manual step inserted there, a spreadsheet that became permanent. By the time anyone examines it, the process is a sediment of accumulated patches rather than a designed workflow. Automating a badly designed process does not improve it. It accelerates it.
Layer three: behaviour.
The most underestimated layer. Finance processes fail because of what people do: forms not completed, receipts not submitted, approvals not sought, steps skipped under deadline pressure. No system fixes behavioural non-compliance. This is why change management in finance transformation matters as much as the technology. Only designing the behavioural change into the solution does.
What this looks like in practice
I was asked to fix a credit card reconciliation process that was months behind schedule with no standardised procedure and significant audit exposure. The instinct would have been to fix the system: improve the application, make it easier to use.
I started by diagnosing all three layers.
The system had gaps, yes. The application was inadequate and needed rebuilding with proper controls and user-friendly design. That was Layer One.
But there were also no finance processes. Monthly reconciliation procedures had never been written. Nobody knew what good looked like, let alone how to achieve it. That was Layer Two.
And staff were not completing forms or submitting receipts: not because they were negligent, but because the process made it easy to forget and difficult to do correctly. That was Layer Three.
The solution addressed all three simultaneously. The system was rebuilt. Processes were written from scratch. And behavioural triggers: automated email reminders, built-in prompts, accountability mechanisms: were embedded directly into the workflow.
The result was 100% on-time completion from the month of implementation. Twenty hours a month of reconciliation work eliminated at that level alone. Rolled out across four teams: eighty hours per month, nearly a thousand hours annually.
The question that changes the diagnostic
When you are looking at a finance process that is not working, the useful question is not “what system do we need?” It is: if we had a perfect system and nobody used it correctly, would we still have this problem?
Almost always, the answer is yes.
That tells you where to start.
Maebh Collins is a Chartered Accountant (FCA, ICAEW) and finance transformation specialist with Big 4 training and twenty years of operational experience as a founder and senior finance leader.
Maebh Collins is a Chartered Accountant (FCA, ICAEW), Big 4 trained, with twenty years of experience building and running international businesses. She specialises in finance transformation, ecommerce operations, and digital strategy.