Cloud ERP for finance? Discover how your finance department will benefit from implementing a cloud ERP solution.
Many small to mid-sized businesses start out using entry-level accounting systems such as QuickBooks. These applications may work for a while, but the gaps in your software will become more prominent once your business begins to grow and your operations and finances become more complex. There will be many warning signs that indicate your company has outgrown its accounting system, but the most obvious one is a heavy reliance on spreadsheets. This significantly reduces your team's productivity and impacts your ability to make timely, data-driven business decisions.
As your company continues to grow, without the right solution, so will the challenges within your finance department. That's where a cloud ERP solution can help and provide your finance team and your business with a huge competitive advantage. Here, we will look at the significant challenges of today's finance teams and how cloud ERP for finance, like Dynamics 365 Business Central, can help you with your financial and accounting management.
Common Challenges of Today's Finance Teams
Large or small businesses face many of the same challenges in finance and accounting today. These challenges may cause many issues, including low morale, lack of financial visibility, and the slowdown of the company's growth. Here are some of the common challenges that most finance teams face today:
🔸 Manual and repetitive work – finance professionals who don't have access to the right tools and automated solutions waste a lot of time each month doing the same, identical tasks repeatedly.
🔸 Inaccurate data and reporting difficulties – due to lack of visibility and inaccurate data, financial reporting can become arduous and time-consuming for finance teams. It's also difficult to provide real-time data.
🔸 Changing regulations and compliance – when everything is conducted manually, it can become more difficult for finance teams to keep track of changing regulations and compliance, which causes a big risk for your company.
🔸 Data silos and lack of data integration – Finance teams also struggle with siloed and disparate reporting solutions across a company. Employees find themselves having to make sense of all the disparate information and manually ensure the data is consistent, leading to errors.
🔸 Lack of mobility and accessibility – As the demand for remote and hybrid work options increases, some finance teams still face issues in this area due to limited tools and capacity to work remotely effectively.
Implementing a cloud-based ERP solution is the first step towards tackling these challenges and the ones that lie ahead.
6 Ways Cloud ERP Helps with Financial and Accounting Management
An ERP solution integrates all your business data and processes into one unified solution. Cloud ERP offers even more benefits and can help streamline your finance department. Here's how your financial and accounting team can leverage cloud ERP for finance.
✅ Smarter Decision Making Using Real-Time, Unified Data
Cloud ERP solutions help businesses tear down data silos and provide access to accurate, unified data from across the organization. As everything is hosted in a central cloud platform, this provides in-depth visibility into financial performance and operations across the entire business. Business leaders can make faster, smarter strategic decisions with the latest information with a complete picture at their fingertips. It also allows business leaders to identify correlations from across the business that may not be visible otherwise. This helps improve forecasting and helps executives mitigate risk more easily – either through early recognition of operational issues or by identifying outlying data.
✅ Automation of Financial Processes Increases Efficiency
Automation provides numerous benefits for businesses, including increased productivity, efficiency, and reduction of manual tasks. Many modern cloud ERP solutions come with built-in workflows and other features that streamline data entry and help you automate financial processes. All of that time saved by your finance team can be better spent on more complex, revenue-generating tasks such as budgeting, forecasting, and analysis. Automation and workflows also help reduce exposure to risk and helping your business meet audit and compliance requirements more effectively.
✅ Reduced Manual Entry & Human Errors
One of the major challenges of gathering data manually is human error. Such errors are considered normal accounting mistakes, but improper or inaccurate financial information can have dire consequences on your accounting. Anything ranging from incorrect client names to inaccurate digits can negatively affect invoices, billing, shipping, etc. These human mistakes then take money, time, and manpower to get fixed. So, the fewer times information must be entered manually, the better the chances are of reducing errors. A cloud ERP solution helps you reduce the need for manual data entry due to a shared, central database for the entire business (where you enter data once instead of across multiple systems) and automation of core business processes.
✅ Improved Financial Reporting
Generating financial reports can be time-consuming and difficult to assemble for the finance team, especially during busy periods like the end of the month. With cloud ERP, financial reporting becomes a lot more streamlined and efficient. They enable the automatic creation of financial reports, and you can print or send them where needed through email. You can access real-time dashboards and reports that help you pinpoint issues quickly, analyze data faster, and dig deeper into your company's performance. For instance, Dynamics 365 Business Central allows users to use built-in reports, Excel, Microsoft Power BI, and unlimited data dimensions to get real-time cash flow and improve business planning.
✅ Enhanced Data Security
Financial information is the most valuable asset of any organization, and it's important to safeguard your data from cyberattacks or breaches. It is a common misconception to believe that on-premises ERP solutions can be safer in this regard. However, modern cloud solutions such as Microsoft ensure robust data security thanks to advanced cutting-edge encryption, multi-factor authentication, and other essential security measures created into all pieces of the system.
✅ More Accessibility
Cloud ERP solutions make it easier to work remotely and on the go. Your employees will have access to a central "single-source-of-truth" database with data that can be accessed on desktop, tablet, or mobile, using an internet connection. This allows for more corporate agility, and higher rates of cross-departmental collaboration as sharing data becomes easier.
Streamline Financial Management with Dynamics 365 Business Central
Dynamics 365 Business Central is Microsoft's cloud-based ERP solution for small and mid-market organizations. It helps companies take control of their financial data, accelerate financial closing and reporting, monitor performance, and make more profitable financial decisions. For more detail into how Business Central can help your finance team, check out this previous article: "How Dynamics 365 Improves Your Business Accounting."
Talk to a Dynamics 365 Business Central Partner
Are you looking to implement or upgrade your on-premises solution to Dynamics 365 Business Central? Get in touch with the team from Kwixand Solutions. We are a Dynamics 365 Business Central Partner based in Vancouver, Canada. We help clients across Canada and the US successfully implement and get the most out of their Business Central cloud solutions.