Applying technology to support finance functions

Technology is constantly evolving and continuously provides new opportunities to enhance your financial operations. Modern-day financial solutions allow finance teams to streamline processes, improve their accuracy and provide powerful data insights.

Recent years have seen a massive amount of change and disruption to businesses everywhere. Businesses need to be highly adaptable in adopting new methods and processes, embracing digital transformation for the good of all stakeholders, customers and staff.

ERP Systems

As business leaders, it’s essential that you understand what an ERP is and how it can benefit your business. An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is a powerful tool that helps businesses organize their operations and manage resources more efficiently. An ERP system combines a wide range of integrated software modules into one comprehensive platform to provide real-time data, increased visibility and control over all aspects of your business operations.

With an ERP system in place, businesses can streamline supply chain management, financial reporting, customer service, project management and more. This unified platform provides greater insights into the entire organization’s performance while allowing better decisions to be made faster. Additionally, an ERP system helps to reduce operational costs and increase productivity by eliminating the need for multiple systems and manual processes.

A Postmodern ERP system is flexible cloud-based IT infrastructure which dissects ERP software into logical components. It is designed to work in tandem with the latest technology, such as mobile applications, voice recognition and artificial intelligence (AI). This allows for a dynamic approach to data collection and analysis. Employees can access important information quickly on any device, from anywhere in the world.

Accounting and Finance Solutions

This Solution Array, based upon GrowCFO’s survey of community members, assesses the performance and capability of leading vendors across four distinct segmentations, relevant to an organization’s size, scale and agility compared with the cost of acquisition and ownership:

The typical upward growth of successful organizations is demonstrated through their software journey. Most small businesses will begin with software that is placed in the SME (Small and Medium-Sized Entities”) category of the Solution Array, when the business model is simple and the finance is likely to be undertaken by an individual who may not be an accountant. Products such as Quickbooks and Xero caters toward a requirement for simplicity.

As the requirements change, so does the software. Organizations that grow to have a complex structure require software that can handle these requirements, an expense that has become engrained culturally within the business world.

As finance departments look to the future, the allure of Legacy ERP systems appears to be stalling, with Traditional ERP and increasingly Postmodern ERP solutions the more popular options as organizations look for a balance between security and functionality. Products such as Netsuite provide full functionality as well as contractual simplicity when using a singular vendor for all business system solutions. However, the costs and lengthy implementations associated with Traditional ERP systems increasingly prove too much for many mid-size enterprises that can implement a Postmodern ERP.

Postmodern ERP solutions can be implemented in stages, allowing organizations to spread out the implementation costs across their business systems. With this flexibility, they can implement the systems they most urgently require at a fraction of the cost and time that they would otherwise spend.

Here’s a link to our full finance systems survey results: GrowCFO Finance Software Survey – GrowCFO