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August 31, 2018

Is Your Accounting System Holding You Back?

Legacy accounting systems have served many organizations well for many years. However, they were designed and implemented to meet the finance and accounting challenges of yesterday— they lack what most forward-looking businesses need for today and tomorrow. That’s because modern finance expects you to perform financial closes faster, process transactions more efficiently and deliver deeper business insights in real-time across the organization.

As your business grows, so does the complexity of managing your accounting and finance operation. Think of how you are handling things like multi-entity financial management, reporting, financial visibility and ASC 606. Do you spend more time on manual processes than in your financial accounting system? If you are facing increasing overhead costs and functional limitations, the antiquated system you have relied on for years may now be a liability.

How do you know when its your accounting system to blame? Let’s take a look at some red flags to help you assess where you are.

Upgrading to a current version will be too costly, difficult and take too much time.

An outdated—perhaps even unsupported—software platform can translate into reliability and downtime problems as well as security vulnerabilities. We know it is daunting to even think about the cost, resources needed and time it will take to upgrade. You may even think you are saving money by “making due,” but the costs of maintaining a legacy system can quickly add up.

Disconnected systems and processes are holding you back.

Have you found yourself spending more and more time on manual processes like spreadsheets and other workarounds? Do you continually rekey information into multiple systems? Finance works best when working seamlessly with other functional departments. Oftentimes legacy accounting systems don’t have the ability to integrate seamlessly with other enterprise tools and systems making the cost of prohibitively high and leaving you with cumbersome workarounds.

You can’t keep up with business expansion.

Are you adding new business units? Expanding into new markets? New geographies? Maybe you are growing through acquisition, creating the immediate need to be able to track the costs of different entities or lines of business. Have you found yourself throwing people at the problem instead, at a large expense? Legacy accounting systems weren’t designed to support the fast growth and expansions that businesses are pursuing.

You aren’t able to fully track your business.

Visibility into what is happening in all areas of your business is critical to success. Without real-time visibility you can’t make informed, timely decisions. Waiting days or even weeks to manually assemble data just won’t cut it. If your legacy accounting system doesn’t allow you to create new reports or customize your old, or if you are having to rely on third-party reporting and analysis to get basic answers, it’s not the right solution for your business.

Wouldn’t it be great to have touch-free upgrades deployed and managed by the vendor with no IT resources needed? What if you had access to pre-built integrations with key applications to automate mission-critical workflows? And think of the impact on reaction time if you had real-time dashboards that show key metrics and drill down details at your fingertips. Today’s modern cloud financial systems can offer just that.

To learn more of the signs your accounting and financial management system is holding you back and what to look for in a best-in-class financial system, check out this White Paper: Have You Outgrown Your Old Accounting System?