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Implement ERP for Financial Management
Somehow, there are still businesses relying on Excel for accounting, reporting and other critical financial processes. Excel makes it a struggle for employees to access information as each department often manages spreadsheets differently. Plus, manual entry results in inconsistent and inaccurate data. Spreadsheets simply can’t serve as the building blocks to a successful enterprise.
To establish a strong foundation for your business, leverage enterprise resource planning (ERP) software for fiscal management. The speed, reliability and insight of ERP can’t be matched by legacy software or spreadsheets. Find out which pitfalls you’re bound to face if you stick to outdated methods and refuse to upgrade to ERP for financial management.
You Are Wasting Valuable Employee Time
Accounting requires the assembly of data from many different departments within an organization. To accomplish this goal using spreadsheets, an employee must be assigned to retrieve data from every team, verify it and collate it into spreadsheets. On top of that, there’s the time of coding and maintaining the structure of the documents themselves. Rather than burden an employee with these tasks, all of that work can be put into the trusted hands of an ERP system.
If you’re not utilizing ERP for financials, your organization is wasting valuable time. Instead of manual data entry, ERP software can grab the information as it is input by the various teams and aggregate them within the system. Modern software is built to ease the burden of employees and streamline processes: take advantage of it. With the software’s help, you can automate the rote work that employees spend so much of their time on—time that would be better redirected towards innovation in their role and working towards growth.
You Are Accepting Inherent Risk
When it comes to your own business, do you want to entrust crucial aspects of your products and business processes to the fickle Excel spreadsheet—which has been shown to be so susceptible to error? Poor spreadsheet coding or Excel malfunctions can totally throw off crucial financial reports, production schedules and the day to day functioning of your business, and small mistakes can go unnoticed until they have caused damage beyond their initial scale. Quite simply, accepting the status quo of spreadsheets and refuting the necessity of robust ERP for financials is accepting an inherent risk to the integrity of your data and your business.
You Are Stunting Business Growth
Although it might not be inherently obvious, sticking with spreadsheets is significantly impacting your bottom line. If your data is corrupted, it could affect key financial reporting and accounting processes that affect your bottom line along with executive planning and decisions. It’s better to be sure you are employing a system built to accurately handle accounting and financial processes than to rely on a much more generalized software like Excel.
Sure, your business can still grow while you are using spreadsheets for critical processes like accounting, and perhaps that is a reason many businesses hold back from implementing enterprise software—they just don’t see a need. But this growth doesn’t compare to what you can achieve when you use ERP for financials. ERP’s scalability and reliability empower you to take advantage of new opportunities for business expansion.
You Are Losing Valuable Insights
You simply can’t code a spreadsheet to generate the insights available in an ERP instance. To get real-time analysis from a spreadsheet, employees need to work within multiple applications and switch between systems for data collection, entry and reporting. With ERP, all that work happens simultaneously inside the software. Connecting your machinery and production lines up to the enterprise network means that data entry is built into the system itself—no employee time necessary.
Moreover, if you locate your ERP software in the cloud, it will become instantly more accessible than spreadsheets. Excel just isn’t intuitive on a mobile platform, and spreadsheets are often cumbersome to edit on a mobile device. SaaS ERP offerings are accessible from any device with an internet connection and often built specifically with mobile functionality and user experience in mind. That means critical data for clients is always accessible to sales people, whether they are in the office or visiting a customer site. Every employee, no matter the location, can make use of ERP for fiscal reporting and accounting processes. You just can’t do that with Excel.
Excel is no doubt a widely useful tool and extraordinarily helpful in many business situations, but it isn’t built for the kind of functionality and processing that ERP accounting systems were made for. Invest in enterprise software, and it will take your data capability to the next level—allowing your team greater control over operations, waste reduction and revenue growth.
Wrap Up
Employing spreadsheets and workbooks instead of ERP for financials could be harming your company more than you think. Even if that damage isn’t immediately visible, small coding and database mistakes will only grow larger and more destructive the longer they exist. Eliminate the possibility of human input error and spreadsheet blunders by entrusting an ERP system and its accounting model with your fiscal needs. You can hit multiple targets with just one business decision, improving reporting and business insights while freeing up time for your employees to pursue value-driven activities.
Are you still stuck in a spreadsheet rut? No idea how to get started on the somewhat daunting path towards ERP? Contact an expert at Datix today! For over 20 years, we have helped countless businesses make the transition. Our methodology has been proven to effectively align each client’s unique business processes closely to ERP. Contact us today!
