There’s an app for that: How low-code tools boost finance productivity

It's no secret that finance organisations are ripe for disruption. Managing money has always been a manual process, from securing payment orders to renewing licences and everything in between.

That's why ServiceNow Chief Financial Officer Gina Mastantuono invested in a formal citizen development programme. She wanted to encourage all finance employees to lean into no- or low-code tools, such as App Engine Studio, to build applications.

Today, 15% of ServiceNow finance employees are citizen developers, with nearly 30 applications in development and production—all built on the Now Platform.

"I'm always thinking about how we can become the finance organisation of the future, where the entire team can do their best work. That's why we invested in this programme," Mastantuono says.

"Now we're automating the mundane yet essential transactional work, centralising workflows and paving the way for more impactful work that minimises risk, drives innovation, accelerates productivity and builds better cross-functional relationships. It's critical to our digital transformation."

Optimising communication

Ejaz A., director of revenue management, knew there had to be a better way for his revenue team to "bring structure to unstructured data", he says. Each quarter, his team would field 3,000 to 5,000 queries from sales teams via chat, phone calls and emails. This involved a lot of back and forth and made for a lot to track.

"Email is effectively a two-way point of communication, which has no interaction with statistics, analytics, visibility or reassignment," Ejaz explains. "From that perspective, I just wanted to improve communication. Citizen development kind of fit our development needs in terms of being user-oriented, user-driven and immediately available."

The team created a ticket intake form, the Revenue Request solution, that centralises all deal-related inquiries. As a result, the team has gained transparency into deal communications, as well as the ability to identify trends and respond to customer and partner questions faster than before.

"We're seeing a real increase in velocity, attainability and illustration," Ejaz says. "And I think that helps us in terms of reassignment and aligning effort and bandwidth. It's opened up a whole new world for us."

Streamlining processes

Padmavathi G., cash collections manager, echoes that sentiment. Each quarter, her cash collections team would receive 500 deals without a purchase order (PO). That meant her team had to manually follow up with sales teams to request the PO, which then prompted sales to request a PO and invoice from the customer.

Padmavathi's team built a three-step wizard to streamline the process using App Engine Studio. The wizard automated notifications sent via email to secure PO numbers, reducing collection risk of more than $100 million per year and decreasing time spent sending emails by 10 to 12 hours per week.

"We spent so many years doing manual work, and now the app takes care of it," Padmavathi notes. "The whole process helped me interact with cross-functional teams and secure key stakeholder buy-in. As a non-technical person, I have so many thoughts and ideas that keep popping up."

Deepening employee engagement

Beyond automating processes through low-code development tools, finance teams are reaping another benefit: deeper engagement. Before Mahesh Reddy M.'s workplace services team built the Statutory Licence and Compliance Renewals app, team members had to track licences and expiry dates in a spreadsheet.

"This increased the risk of missing deadlines due to human interaction and manual processes. So, when we got this information about App Engine Studio, we went through some trainings and built an app without coding," Mahesh Reddy explains. "Now, the app tracks compliance and licence due dates and automatically sends proactive reminder emails to owners. We built our own app. I'm very proud."

The payroll team also relied on spreadsheets and emails to track deadlines and understand errors. If a stakeholder delivers information after a deadline, employees might not get paid on time. With more than 22,000 employees across 40 countries, there's a lot of information to be managed.

That prompted the payroll team to partner with finance's analytics and insights team to build the Payroll app to track emails and send automated reminders to stakeholders. This ultimately provided better reporting too.

"Now, whenever someone from the leadership team asks, 'Can you give me a payroll health check?' I can just go to the system. And in five minutes, I can show them real-time issues rather than spending hours digging through my emails from last quarter," says Sandeep N., senior manager of payroll management. "I can speak about this app forever because it's my favourite app."

Citizen development is helping ServiceNow finance teams accelerate productivity, optimise communication, streamline processes and deepen engagement. But it's not limited to finance applications and processes. Find out how ServiceNow can help you plan your citizen development programme.

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