ERP & Finance

ERP integration has many (semi) immediate benefits, but if you want to know where you’ll see the fastest results, just read below.

Vendor bills are quickly integrated into your ERP system without any rekeying or reworking. This is immediately more efficient, saving time that you can spend on core activities.

Bank, card, and expense-related data is automatically posted. Automation here provides a real-time view of transactions, enabling you to identify patterns, helping you spot troublesome areas and take appropriate action. For example, approvals are routed before payment is authorized.

Sales, subscriptions, and deferred revenue are synced for immediate updates without duplicate entries or delays that typically result from old manual processes, like exporting spreadsheet data.

Close tasks are tracked with system hand-offs. This contributes to clear audit trails and also ensures traceable accountability and system visibility.

We looked at the areas that deliver the quickest benefits, but what about the systems that need to be automated to deliver those results? Let’s see.

• Procure-to-pay: Data flows seamlessly from request through to payment.
• Order-to-cash: Automation steers data from first quote to collection.
• Payroll-to-general ledger (GL): Data flows with dimensions

It’s also a good idea to automate the path of fixed assets, from purchase to disposal. This helps to optimize their use, enables you to set reminders for maintenance, and suggests when it’s time to purchase a new asset.

Set automated KPI feeds that go directly to dashboards for leadership to assess. Leadership and other stakeholders, like boards, must be able to track performance. KPIs are a good measure of progress, effectively recording important milestones and missed targets.

This data can be used to drive strategy and planning to ensure your business remains on track.

Your vendor portal enhances supplier management by providing a direct line of contact between your suppliers and procurement and finance teams. We don’t want to fiddle with a system that works. So, we leave your portal to ensure efficiency, transparency, and accuracy.

Instead, we implement a plan to work with the platform, which includes several ways to effectively manage vendor portals and PDFs.

In no particular order, these are:

• Set a central intake point for invoices and statements.
• Implement three-way match rules for easy auditing.
• Enable duplicate and threshold checks by policy.

We also use some advanced tools to read text from images. For example, we use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to line-level (granular level) if necessary. This improves accuracy and efficiency.

We can also set the system to provide status updates back to requestors.

To start, we set alerts for exceptions instead of every action. This prevents bottlenecks and ensures that important alerts for exceptions aren’t lost in a glut of alerts with no real value.

Role-based approvals ensure that only people with the proper authority can access data. It can go a step further and establish role-based approvals with segregation of duties. As a result, there is no overlap or doubling up on tasks or activities.

Timeboxed windows set a specific timeframe for completing a specific task. When set for edits and journals, employees focus on their work without distractions. Timeboxes can also help your finance team stay organized and facilitate the smooth management of team meetings.

We create immutable logs (tamper-proof records) of crucial or sensitive data for reviewers and auditors. And, provide templates that normalize edge cases to ensure exceptions or unusual events are handled with a standardized approach. This helps streamline data processing without disruptions.

Finance dashboards are intended to convey an overview of data so leadership and boards can see (and understand) the current situation at a glance. However, dashboards are also designed to provide more in-depth or granular data by drilling down into specific metrics. Here are just a few examples:

• Cash-related data, like cash flow, margins, and runway, is accessible in a single view.
• Billing data that shows the accurate, current state of billing and unbilled work.
• Close progress organized by task and blocker.

Two more critical metrics that finance dashboards should include are:

1) DSO (Day Sales Outstanding), which is the time it takes to collect payment after a credit sale. It helps to establish cash flow and is a good indicator of your company’s financial health.

2) Vendor aging reports (also known as AP aging reports) track outstanding bills. They provide a quick view of your current payment obligations. This helps prioritize payments and manage cash flow.

This is your map to success. It takes your goals (visions) and provides practical steps to make them come true. It assigns specific roles and responsibilities to individual team members, as well as team activities that require cooperation and collaboration.

It includes a timeframe with deadlines per task, for instance plotting milestones and setting KPIs to monitor and measure performance. It also includes the resources needed to achieve goals, like tools, materials, people, and, of course, budget.

Additional key components include:

• Scope and deliverables
• Risk assessment and mitigation
• Training and support
• Evaluation
• Reporting

Communication is another vital component. When it comes to an implementation plan, communication must follow a formal structure. For instance, a middleman or gatekeeper who stands between employees working on the plan and leaders who monitor the plan. Someone who manages daily problems/queries and sends more complex queries or challenges upstream.

This also includes reporting frequency. format, and recipients.