5 Ways ERP Software Can Transform Your Accounting Department
If your business is growing, have you found it is taking longer and longer to determine the financials at the end of each month? If your accounting department is struggling to keep up with demand this could quickly result in late reports or missed files, and your business could face a decline in customer satisfaction. This complex department is a crucial part of the business and handles many of the important back-end processes: it’s responsible for recording and reporting cash flow transactions well as keeping up with payroll and tax procedures.
To help smooth out the working of the finance department, many businesses have implemented enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions. Implementing an ERP system provides options for managing and maintaining financial controls in the accounting department. But how exactly can it improve your business? If your business operates within the manufacturing industry, you may want to click here to learn about ERP for Manufacturing and how ERP consulting services can help you grow. With this in mind, here are five ways ERP software can transform your accounting department.
1. Integration with Other Departments
As your company grows, it becomes more critical that your accounting department can effectively unite with other departments. The risk of higher demand for the business and poor teamwork of all departments can lead to employees becoming disorganised. Without a clearly defined process, departments can easily perform similar or duplicate tasks that can result in double spending of resources. By implementing an ERP system, you are able to create integration between accounting and other departments.
Each department may use some different programmes. As the company expands, its needs may require widening the range of software packages used to handle more tasks. With the ERP integration, the work of multiple programs can be combined under one system. This one system can then perform all company tasks, allow all departments and managers to co-ordinate their tasks and work better together in continuing to expand the business. There are several operations within a business, and understanding all of these and finding a way to integrate them is essential to the smooth functioning of the company. You could consult this list of business process to understand these operations better and assess how optimally each department is running in your venture.
2. Business Process Automation
Process automation enables businesses to remove complex, or redundant steps from their existing processes to make them more straightforward. Adopting an ERP solution can offer a more streamlined approach and add simplicity to critical business processes.
Many financial tasks and general accounting can be automated to increase productivity. ERP providers such as Pegasus software can automate mundane accounting tasks and duties, freeing up the department’s time for tasks that require extra attention to detail. In the accounting department, error-checking is vital but can be a time-consuming task. Process automation within your ERP solution will aid the error-checking of large amounts of data and decrease the time spent by the team on mundane accounting duties. This saved time can then be spent on other important tasks and potentially saves the need to employ more department staff.
3. Real-time Financial Information
For a business to maintain its growth trajectory, accurate data recording is crucial. The era of relying on paper invoices and sales orders should be replaced with more efficient methods. Manual accounting processes, which involve spending hours each week inputting data into various systems, can lead to inaccuracies and delays. To address this, implementing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems can streamline these processes. With the best ERP systems, you may only need to input data once, and it can be automatically shared across different departments. This real-time synchronization ensures that accurate and up-to-date information is accessible throughout the entire organization. The accounting department, in particular, benefits from enhanced accuracy and efficiency. The use of top-notch ERP systems allows you to centralize accounting information, providing the ability to view comprehensive dashboards across different departments and locations. This consolidation of data improves decision-making, enhances collaboration, and contributes to the overall growth of the business.
4. Business Intelligence
Many businesses are manually gathering data from various different software programmes and manipulating data into spreadsheets to create a static report. However, these reports may not provide an adequate analysis of the data collected for your accounting department. ERP solutions provide integrated Business Intelligence (BI) modules that enable companies to generate dynamic reports, giving the end user access to exactly what they want to see at the time that they need to see it. Furthermore, instead of having to manually check large quantities of data, the BI tool will provide insight and identify patterns within the data, which can help you determine and predict future cash flow. Having this insight to the cash flow predictions enables your business to plan sales and marketing campaigns, purchasing inventory and consider any future growth plans.
5. Manage Multiple Currencies
Expanding your business into different regions can be challenging, particularly if existing systems or software do not easily support multi-currency. When your business systems cannot handle multiple currencies, this could result in accounting errors entering the system through changing conversion rates. By implementing ERP software within your accounting department, you will have access to features that support a wide range of currencies. These features enable real-time conversion rate updates and will undertake the conversion for you giving you peace of mind whilst allowing you to oversee the continual process of building your business globally.
