Increase Visibility and Business Intelligence with ERP Integrations
Your finance team’s accounting, forecasting and planning capabilities directly affect your bottom line. These team members analyze and report on data as they allocate business resources, but they may be hamstrung by disconnected applications and legacy solutions. If this is your situation, it is time to support your finance team with ERP, “enterprise resource planning” software.
Adopting a modern cloud-based ERP solution is a multi-step process. First, you must understand what ERP software is and how it drives greater visibility and business intelligence for you and your finance team.
ERP has been around for decades, and, in that time, it has at times earned the reputation of being too expensive and too complicated for smaller organizations. But the truth is, ERP solutions are exactly what small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) need to compete with their larger, resource-rich competitors.
In short, an ERP solution is a central repository for the data flowing from departments throughout an organization. It may also store data for third-party applications upon which a business relies. So, team members can easily draw on real-time, synchronized, updated information.
Delivering Seamless Integrations across All Business Applications
ERP systems may be hosted in the cloud, on a company’s physical premises, or through a hybrid cloud/on-premises environment. There are pros and cons to each hosting option, but cloud-based ERP solutions tend to deliver the biggest dividends.
A modern cloud-based ERP system like Acumatica can seamlessly integrate with essential third-party applications and provide greater visibility into your business operations—accounting, sales, marketing, supply chain, management, and much more. Greater visibility equals greater awareness. You’ll know what’s happening when (and where) in your sales cycle, and cloud-based ERP solutions offer 24/7 access to all your synchronized business data—whenever, from wherever.
But finding an ERP solution that can handle your unique needs takes careful research. Here are some important questions to ask when evaluating ERP software.
- Can the ERP software provide automated workflows with continuous compliance?
- Can it integrate multiple entities and lines of business, even internationally?
- Can accounts payable and receivable data be migrated from the legacy system to the new system without affecting the general ledger?
- Does its financial management toolkit offer critical functionalities, such as general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, recurring revenue management, etc.?
- Does the system have open APIs for additional business applications?
- Can I easily customize at the application layer to suit my unique needs?
Improving the Intelligence and Accuracy of Your Financial Planning
Streamlining financial management through ERP software delivers an incredible return on investment. For example, automation eliminates manual billing, payment, and revenue processes, saving time and sidestepping human error. Personalized dashboards, real-time visibility into updated data, and seamlessly coordinated business systems save hours of data compilation.
So, to recap, a cloud ERP software will help you more efficiently track profits and costs, improve productivity, eliminate paper files, and increase company-wide insights. In addition, the automated, internal controls of ERP software can help you comply with laws, regulations, and industry standards.
Managing Compliance and Regulatory Governance
Finance teams must track company transactions and provide accurate, auditable financial records that align with industry standards. But manually managing compliance and regulatory governance can lead to costly mistakes.
To avoid this risk and produce accurate financial statements, the right cloud ERP solution should assist businesses in adhering to state, federal, and international laws with built-in compliance capabilities.
How Acumatica Can Help
Your finance team has a complex job, which can be simplified by increased visibility, business intelligence, and data accuracy.
Accomplish this by supporting your finance team with ERP software that offers streamlined and automated financial operations, provides real-time insights from a centralized database, and consolidates financial matters under a single pane of glass.
A system like Acumatica.
Born in the cloud, Acumatica delivers an affordable, flexible ERP software resting on a future-proof platform. Its cloud ERP software helps SMBs and their finance teams thrive in today’s digital economy. For example, take Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE).
CCE, Acumatica’s 2022 Impact Customer of the Year, is a non-profit organization in New York state. Its mission is to “help residents raise children, save money, conserve energy, grow and prepare food, sustain farms, grow businesses, and protect the environment.” CCE’s state-level finance team, which manually processed financial data on spreadsheets, was overwhelmed with growing demands—until they adopted Acumatica.
Now, CCE staff members have streamlined their processes with access to real-time information. They also enjoy full financial transparency, real-time reporting, higher revenue, and self-service access to critical financial data, which has significantly improved their response times when sending reports to officials and New York residents.
To learn more about Acumatica’s cloud-based ERP solution, contact our experts today.