A lot of companies silo their accounting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems in ways that keep them separated. Depending on the size of your business, you may not even have an ERP system implemented within your organization, but hopefully after you read this article, your feelings about this will change. You see, the primary purpose of ERP systems is to both assist accounting with the books and help your finance team with reports and monetary monitoring, while simultaneously keeping the rest of your organization’s workflow running smoothly. Great ERP systems incorporate both accounting and finance functions (as well as other departments’ responsibilities), facilitating an overall ease and flow to your operations management processes.
Why Should You Integrate Accounting and Finance into Your Cloud ERP?
We’ll take a deeper dive into some of the important reasons you should use your ERP system for accounting and financial management. At a high level, however, many of these benefits come back to one core issue: integration. Most accounting systems necessitate data inputs from several different sources, including manufacturing, warehouse, logistics, billing, and human resources. ERP-based accounting automates many previously manual processes, integrating these multiple data sources into once single, unified platform.
When you consider the benefits your company can realize from integrating accounting and financial management with your cloud-based ERP system, the positives far outweigh the costs. Here’s a look at a few key factors you should consider:
1. Richly Detailed Financial Reports
If you’re using a standalone accounting package, you likely have access to some rudimentary financial reports, such as income statements and balance sheets. However, when you integrate your ERP, you’ll have access to dozens of various reports that let you dig deeper into your organization’s operations. For example, you might be able to create cash flow estimates based on your inventory management sector or forecast income based on accounts receivable overlaid with your customer order channels.
These in-depth reports do more than just provide financial information; they help you manage your operations more effectively.
2. More Automation
The more you automate your processes, the more productive your business will be. When you link your ERP, accounting, and financial management systems together, it’s simpler to automate workflows that traverse between these otherwise siloed systems. ERP systems can often remove a lot of the manual entry and human-centric tasks that are required with many accounting and finance systems. For example, you might be able to completely streamline accounts receivable, accounts payable, and your cash management systems.
Automation is the key to letting you trace financial transactions more efficiently, too.
3. Elimination of Duplicate Entries
When you operate several systems, the same information often needs to be entered time and time again (usually manually). By integrating your ERP and financial systems, you’ll eliminate this tedious systems involving data entry by hand over and over.
ERPs make data entry fast, consistent, and minimal.
4. Fewer Errors
Speaking again to the manual side of data entry, when something has to be entered by people over and over again, you’re putting your systems at risk for inevitable human error. The fewer times things have to be entered manually, the better your chances of eliminating unwanted human errors.
It’s easy for people to make small mistakes that can cost you a lot of money. Anything ranging from transposed digits to incorrect client names can ultimately impact invoices, billing, shipping, and any other aspect of your business. Each manual error can result in calculation mistakes, which then take time, money, and manpower to reverse engineer.
With ERP integration, you can also see which team member performed which transactions, making it easier to track people down and rectify mistakes, should errors occur.
5. A Higher Degree of Control
Overall, when you use ERP systems for accounting and financial management, you’ll have more influence over your business processes. You’ll be able to see the bottom-line impact of events and the decisions your business has made in real time.
Hire Cloud 9 ERP Solutions
At Cloud 9 ERP Solutions, we’re proud to say that we help businesses of all sizes integrate Acumatica’s financial management solution into their existing processes. Through our work, our clients find improved efficiency, fewer manual errors, and greater relief of their staffs’ daily duties. We invite you to watch an overview demo of Acumatica’s financial management solution today!
