As a smart business owner, one of the investments you made when you first started the business was in an accounting software in order to stay on top of the financial operations of your business. The software did the job and you were happy with it. However, lately, your accounts team has been complaining about how slow and kludgy the software is? And you are thinking to yourself, “What? No, that can’t be true. I have been using it for all these years. They must not know how to use it.” Well, we have a news for you……………..
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Are you still using the accounting software you bought when you first started the business?
Are you still using the accounting software you bought when you first started the business?
As a smart business owner, one of the investments you made when you first started the business was in accounting software to stay on top of the financial operations of your business. The software did the job, and you were happy with it.
However, lately, your accounts team has been complaining about how slow and kludgy the software is. And you are thinking to yourself, "What? No, that can't be true. I have been using it for all these years. They must not know how to use it."
Well, if you are that staff member who complained, WE ARE WITH YOU! If you are the business owner, sorry to break it to you but your staff is right. You bought the software about ten years ago, and your business has grown by leaps and bounds since then, your turnover is now over $2 Million, and your team is double the size. How do you expect the same software to work for you any more?
Need more clarity? Let's look at eight signs that its time for a new and updated financial management solution for your business :
1. An extremely lengthy and complicated end of the month financial activity:
Your staff is spending hours every month processing and reporting each month’s financial activity. This is due to manual activities like converting currencies, consolidating accounts across different groups, adjusting accruals and prepayments, etc. Despite a predictable and regular process, the software requires them to start from scratch every month and doesn't give them access to the information they need from different business areas.
2. Use of multiple excel sheets:
Your department managers and even staff accountants are all using spreadsheets more than the accounting software. They are doing budgets and various other calculations on spreadsheets because your current system doesn’t have the features or the features are out of date. They are using spreadsheets so they can work on it from home because your current software is site-based.
3. Spending too much time re-entering the data:
Because of the use of a few other silo systems like your accounting software, information is not flowing between them, so your staff has to re-enter and reconcile every single data. This is leading to further issue like errors with data entry, a significant cost in finding and fixing these errors, the absence of a central data source, and conflicting information since different people are entering information in different systems/documents.
4. All the users can't use the software at the same time:
All the users can't use the software at the same time. The software either prevents multiple users from operating the system simultaneously or it corrupts or freezes altogether, from the burden of multiple users.
5. No integration with new systems:
As your business has grown, you have added new systems like CRM, HRM, Inventory Management, etc. However, your accounting software cannot integrate with the new systems. The only way to integrate the two is through expensive, time-consuming custom programming or manual data entry.
6. Inability to customise:
Your company is required to produce a particularly detailed report by the tax department, but your entry-level accounting software allows limited or no changes in fields, columns or rows. So, your staff has to manually create these reports, rather than providing the expertise they were hired for.
7. No Insight
Your current accounting software does not let you compare sales by region or product type, view the existing sales pipeline and inventory level, drill down to see real-time information on key performance indicators, and other business intelligence essential to making an informed decision.
8. You rely on guesswork:
Because of the lack of accurate, real-time and single-source data insights, it is difficult for you to do proper trend analysis. As a result of which, your business budgets and sales forecast mostly rely on guesswork.
Do you relate with any of them? If you do, you know now what your staff is going through. An outdated system doesn't just choke up the business but also affects employee morale. When you invest in an advanced and scalable financial management system, you invest in your staff and their efficiency.
But before you decide on buying a financial management solution, be sure to discuss your options with an expert. You don't want to put in thousands of dollars only to find out that it was not the right choice for your business type.
Over these years, we have helped numerous companies across industries like manufacturing, wholesale, not for profit, retail, jobbing and service, and the likes, streamline their business processes and prepare for growth by equipping them with the right business solutions.
