Day and in and day out I talk to finance and operations leaders who want to embrace automation but don't know how to do it.

And I get it. It's not easy because a single invoice in their company could be for millions of dollars. In fact, I spoke to a shipping provider that lost INR 30 crores ($3.4 million) because of a small data entry error in their document.

Errors like these force them to think that every line item needs to be verified by a human. But that's the wrong way to go about it. In 2025, document automation has come a long way. An accounting manager can set up a data extraction and validation workflow in minutes.

That's why I believe that document automation shouldn't be confined to the engineering team. Here's why:

The problem with relegating automation to engineering and IT teams

For decades, whenever someone thinks about automation, the engineering team is their first port of call. The business user describes the workflow and IT or engineering gets to work. 

While this process worked at a surface level, there are several pitfalls that break the process:

Lack of domain knowledge

The IT team is often far removed from business operations and lacks the context that you have. They don’t understand the nitty-gritty details of documents, the expected data, and how the extracted data fits into the larger scheme of things. 

You spend hours sharing knowledge and still end up with subpar document automation.

Studies prove it. A majority of projects, particularly data-related, fail due to the lack of understanding of the business context and user needs. In the end, you bear the brunt of failed projects. 

A small mistake in your workflows results in delayed operations, missed payments, or failed service level agreements. 

Trouble maintaining a dedicated team

Another issue that Jishnu N.P., Docxster’s CTO, pointed out is the trouble maintaining a dedicated IT team for document automation. 

New document automation workflows aren’t added frequently, and existing workflows develop issues far and few in between. A dedicated team stays underutilized and overbilled. 

Even having one ML engineer onboard costs close to $50,000 (USD) in India. A dedicated team makes no sense financially for irregular tasks. 

False promise of template-based extraction

IT teams tend to default to template-based systems because it's ordered and easy to use. But we also know that a single deviation could break the entire system. 

As you onboard new vendors, you'll see more document formats. No matter how hard you try to enforce a template, when you have thousands of documents coming in every week, it becomes unmanageable.

Then, your team has to redo everything manually which just wastes more time. 

In one of our surveys, Lawrence Guyot, President, ETTE, shared that around 25% of their documents keep deviating from expected formats.

While template-based automation looks cost-effective, the time and financial costs stack up over time.

It’s high time businesses look for more adaptable and cost-effective ways to drive document automation. Something that reduces dependency on IT and rigid systems.

Why business users must own document automation

Many businesses are now shaking things up. 84% of businesses are adopting no-code platforms and taking control themselves instead of depending on IT.

No-code Anybody Can Do Automation (ABCD) automation platforms let business users create flows with drag-and-drop interfaces. Such business-led document automation brings these benefits:

Speed

You no longer have to wait for the IT team and spend hours on knowledge transfer. As soon as you have a requirement, you can create a new workflow in minutes. No-code platforms like Docxster also provide ready-to-use templates to make the workflow creation even more easy. 

Also, as a business user, you’re closer to different parties that work with documents. You’ll be able to communicate any changes faster and make required changes to workflow quicker.

Let’s say your team decides to provide a rush order facility against a charge. But their purchase orders need to mention this. 

Instead of going back to the developer, you can tweak the workflow to pull just one more column of rush order fees. You can also inform all buyers simultaneously to add a rush order fee column in their purchase orders.

Instead of weeks of back and forth, you can push new changes in days or hours for any business requirements. 

Accuracy

When you’re the expert, you know exactly what data you need from a document.You can design more accurate extraction workflows with enough validations to check if something comes up wrong. 

For instance, you’d already know if the batch number will be alphanumeric or numeric in an inspection document. You can add validations in workflows to flag if the batch number wrongly shows up as a word out of the blue. 

Collaboration

There's always an ongoing tension between business users and engineering teams when a workflow breaks. But one's at fault.

It's more of the system's inability to handle exceptions. Instead of firefighting internally, you need to adopt a platform that doesn't rely on templates.

With templateless extraction, your automated workflows rely on you, the user. So, you can tweak it to your liking and involve engineers only when you need to create a more complicated workflow.

The entire process becomes more collaborative rather than a fruitless blame game.  

Cost

With business-led automation, you save the labor cost of developing simple workflows. You can get no-code tools like Docxster for just $450 a year.

Advanced no-code tools also give you a more flexible system that won’t fail for every small change. Guyot shared that every one out of four documents deviates from templates. 

Existing template-based document workflows will fail for those documents. And every failure comes with a cost. Labor costs for handling the failure and clearing the file.

For example, if a purchase order fails in the extraction process, then shipping gets delayed, which leads to possible revenue loss.

Business-led automations save both labor costs and potential revenue loss.

How no-code document automation tools shift ownership 

The entire shift from IT-led document automation to business-led automation has been made possible by no-code automation tools. These tools give the control back to business teams by:

Enable Anybody-Can-Do automation 

When we were building Docxster, the first thing we had in mind was that any business user must be able to use it from day one. It must be a simple plug-and-play logic. And we stuck to it.

No-code automation platforms make building workflows so easy that users can start making them without any assistance.

Shorten implementation time

We also know that mere data extraction doesn’t do much for your business. You need to move the data around in the right systems to actually make them actionable. That’s why we built a Workflow Builder—so that you can import and export data from and to any system you need. 

Only involve your engineering team when you need to set up a really complicated workflow.

Avoid wrangling template-based tools

Automating traditional template-based extraction wasn’t an option. No-code platforms make automation possible by moving templates out of the picture and using AI-driven templateless extraction. 

You don’t need support from ML engineers to design templates and create workflows (unless it’s really complicated).

Automate review and validation (with humans)

In no-code tools, you can also automate the advanced review and validation steps. For example, Docxster platforms handle basic validations by default. 

You can set up advanced checks like comparing two documents. Let’s say you want to compare the product quantity in the purchase order and the shipping label. It's possible to add this comparison step by using the drag-and-drop interface.

For cases where human review is necessary, you can also add a human-in-the-loop (HITL) review step to the workflow. For example, you want the finance and procurement team to approve invoices above a certain amount. An automated email will go to both teams whenever a high-value invoice lands in the inbox. 

No-code platforms help you add enough checkpoints to ensure that while things are automated, they aren’t unmonitored.

User-led automation is the future

Automation is no longer a luxury limited to large-scale enterprises. Now, with no-code automation tools coming into the picture, it's cost-effective for SMEs too.

Marketing and sales teams have already experimented with user-led automation, and it is now part of their everyday workflows. You’ll often find sales teams building their own workflows to generate custom proposals/contracts automatically.

It’s time now for the finance and operations team to improve their productivity with user-led automation. After all, business continuity improves if automation scales with volume, not headcount.

If you’re an operations or finance leader who wants to automate your regular document workflows and focus on more strategic tasks, book a quick demo of Docxster now.