These days, finance directors face a multitude of challenges within their role as finance leader. New regulatory and compliance controls require careful planning and organisation, ensuring systems are in place to capture and submit relevant data. Strategic planning has become a core focus, with FDs partnering other business departments and communicating effectively with the board and stakeholders to drive company growth and success. In addition, political and economic instability has thrown up a range of obstacles, meaning that finance directors must respond with agility and creativity to achieve company goals and targets.
So, how can finance directors find the right support to help them fulfil their responsibilities?
While digital transformation presents its own challenges, finance directors can take advantage of technological developments and harness new systems to support them in their day-to-day responsibilities and activities, contributing to the success of their organisation.
Improved reporting and analytics
With intelligence a necessity for making informed budgeting, planning and forecasting decisions, keeping on top of software developments and implementing the latest updates is key to ensuring that organisations thrive in changing environments. Being able to quickly access accurate and insightful data leads to companies being able to identify new opportunities, or challenges, and respond accordingly. Failure to have such software support slows down a company’s ability to react and prosper, affecting short and long-term growth.
Modern technology also removes the risk of inaccurate reporting by taking manual re-keying of data out of the equation. Re-keying can easily lead to simple errors, which can have a significant impact on a business. Consequences include financial losses and reputational damage – neither a welcome occurrence for finance directors.
Implementing company strategy
Within a business, data needs to travel, whether that’s to other business departments or from a company to its suppliers. Interoperability is therefore essential to an efficient finance function, and choosing software that allows business systems to transfer and share this data is critical.
In addition, it is important for finance directors to ensure that IT suppliers are in tune with the company’s digital ambitions. Businesses should ensure that their suppliers are continually improving their processes and technology, allowing them to move forward together innovatively and quickly.
In recent years, the role of finance has evolved, with the finance function becoming strategic players within a business. Next generation finance technology enables the finance department to be a strategic partner to other business departments by promoting easy sharing of data across the organisation. And this can all be done without additional time pressures on the finance team. By implementing systems that allow for devolved access, non-finance staff can access the information they need, whenever they need it.
Removing the need for finance staff to provide continuous reporting updates, the team can focus on company strategy and analytics – again, supporting overall business growth.
Delivering success
Moving from traditional accounting software to cloud accounting has many benefits for businesses, including time and costs savings, multiple user access, and real-time updates. Once this step has been taken, further developments in technology and software allow businesses to drive forward their company growth strategies by providing key data reports and time savings to finance teams.
Innovation enables companies to stay ahead of the competition and overcome business obstacles, all the while ensuring regulatory compliance and accurate reporting without the need for increasing spend. For finance directors in particular, embracing digital transformation and adapting to new technology is key to success in the modern world.
It’s a brave new world. But what if your finance software supplier isn’t…?
What if they’re timidly clinging on to the old ways of doing things?
Legacy technology, dated business models and ancient processes?
If any of these are ringing true, you need to take a peek at what you should be keeping an eye out for to ensure you’re making the most of your systems. The guys over at bluQube have been beavering away to give us the best advice from what they’ve learnt over the past 20 years in the finance software industry. Feedback they’ve had from customers and collaborators which have helped them develop their product to what it is today and insights from industry trends and market developments.
Here are seven quick questions to help you keep an eye on whether your supplier is keeping up.
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