ERP in the Finance Department

“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest,” said Benjamin Franklin. Enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), such as Navigator’s SAP solutions, are specifically designed to pay dividends with the kind of knowledge you need to make business-critical decisions.

ERP in the finance department is especially beneficial - it helps you save time and money, not to mention grow profits, while giving you all the facts you need about your company’s finances. It’s true that standalone accounting software packages can adequately handle many financial tasks. They typically cannot scale as your company grows, however, and they keep information in a silo, which doesn’t help the cause of financial transparency. Worse, the time it takes to integrate disparate data makes forecasting a lot harder.

Cloud ERP solutions streamline processes, simplify accounting, and integrate financials from every aspect of the business. The result is less time spent on manual data entry, collection, and collation, and more free time for strategic growth initiatives.

Advantages of ERP Packages

The ability to have real-time, accurate, and auditable financial data in one intuitive interface is one of the top advantages of ERP packages. Although ERP functional areas of management are plentiful, ERP software is especially popular for managing the inflow and outflow of money for many reasons:

• You can complete all your business transaction processing, reporting, and analytics in one system.
• Core accounting features simplify areas such as general ledgers, accounts receivable, accounts payable, fixed assets, project management, cash/liquidity, compliance, and reporting (both internally and externally).
• Robust workflows are enabled through the automation of routine tasks.
• Tax and regulatory compliance locally and abroad are made easier by embedding internal controls into process flows and enhancing transparency through real-time reporting.
• Period-end closings are accelerated across multiple locations, businesses, and currencies.
• Liquidity is optimized with timely, accurate invoicing and electronic payment processing.

With an ERP solution, you gain transparency and insight into financial performance throughout the entire enterprise. Accounting staff who have to work with data from different offices are often burdened by integrating all the financials, but an SAP Cloud ERP solution comes with prebuilt configurations for different countries and multi-location integrations. This helps staff establish parallel ledgers that simultaneously manage to report regardless of fiscal-year accounting, currency, and taxation differences.

You can also get an easier look at profitability for individual business units with real-time reports that let you analyze revenue and costs by multiple dimensions, such as cost center, department, and customer.

Transactionally, ERP solutions can automate the entire payment process, allowing you to schedule payment runs so you can take advantage of early-payment discounts offered by your suppliers, and do so in their desired payment method, whether that’s a check, electronic bank transfer, or direct debit.

Simplicity Strengthens Productivity and User Satisfaction

Remote working will continue in 2022, and it will likely be an indefinite option for many employees. The success of this shift will hinge on how well workers are supported outside the workplace. Cloud ERP makes remote work simpler, as it doesn’t require tricky VPN logins and gives everyone a simple dashboard for data access.

With many ERP platforms, including SAP Cloud ERP, employees can still work in their familiar Microsoft Excel environment. They simply export business data from SAP to a spreadsheet on their personal computers. The difference is that they can get real-time data from the system to generate reports instantly.

A Holistic Financial View With ERP Functional Areas of Management

ERP functional areas of management include all your other business operations as well so you can get a stronger financial picture of where money is going out to and coming in from. Integrated data from areas such as manufacturing, supply chain management, sales and marketing, customer relationship management, and even human resources gives executives and other knowledge workers deep and timely insight into financial performance throughout the business.

Insights into supply chains are particularly enhanced, as an ERP system helps ensure cost predictability, ongoing price monitoring for materials, prompt claims and order processing, and more accurate forecasting. Sales processes are automated, as the system can immediately generate a purchase order, perform a credit check, and send out an invoice with the correct cost amounts.

Critical insights help grant you a stronger ability to react to market dynamics and help you gain insight into financial performance and take advantage of new business opportunities quickly.

SAP Cloud ERP Provides the Knowledge That Pays Dividends

An investment in cloud ERP makes total financial sense when you see all the powerful knowledge it provides at your fingertips.

Navigator’s SAP Cloud ERP solutions are specifically designed for growing organizations. SAP Cloud ERP encompasses the cloud-based ERP solutions based on the market-leading SAP Business One, SAP Business ByDesign, and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition platforms. SAP Cloud ERP solutions are complete enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems with built-in intelligent technologies, including AI, machine learning, and advanced data analytics.