Many companies do not realize the strong link between their accounting and financial systems and their ability to achieve higher performance levels. While good technology and processes can increase your chances of achieving your business’s goals, not having a solid system in place can have a detrimental impact.
Here are five giveaways that your current accounting and financial systems are detracting from your business success:
1. It is too hard to find out what is really happening across your business in real time.
You are wasting time creating, updating, or looking for spreadsheets for various needs. Your management reports are prone to errors or are out of date. Plus, your current accounting system reports are not providing you with the information you need to make educated business decisions.
2. You are spending too much time re-entering and reconciling data across systems.
There are paper trails of sales orders, manual order entry, and invoicing. You may have incorrect customer information that is resulting in customer dissatisfaction. You have slow and disjointed approval processes. Or, financial consolidation, forecasting, and budgeting take a long time to complete.
3. You are losing sales because you cannot get information where it is needed fast enough.
Customer service fails because agents don’t have up-to-date information. Stock never seems to be where customers want it and your customers and vendors may have trouble finding the product information they need on your website. Or, you cannot easily collect and filter customer information for sales campaigns.
4. You are doing more of your accounting outside of the main system than in it.
Finance staff members may be using several applications to do their jobs. You may find it difficult to add new sales channels, product lines, or locations. Or, you generally just cannot adapt fast enough to changing business conditions.
5. You are spending too much time worrying about technology instead of focusing on business results.
You keep putting off upgrades and improvements because of the cost and disruption. You are constantly worrying about backups, server failures, malware, and data security. Or, the amount of time it will take before you see a return makes you wary of investing in new technology.
If you are experiencing one or more of these signs, it is time to take a critical look at your financial information systems and processes to see how they could be improved in order to help you achieve your business performance goals.
Sassan S. Hejazi is a director with Kreischer Miller and a specialist for the Center for Private Company Excellence. Contact him at Email.
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