Is it time to upgrade?
8 questions to help you decide
Having the right finance and accounting software in place is
an essential platform for your business strategy, especially
if you're ambitious for growth, organically or by acquisition.
Without promoting any particular vendor solution, this guide
is intended to help you to assess whether the solution you
currently have in place have the scale and power to drive
your business. Should you decide that it is time to move on, it
offers guidance on how you start defining your wish-list for it's
replacement, whichever vendor you ultimately choose.
Choosing the right software to suit your business
is not a project to be undertaken lightly. It can
be hard to let go of a solution that may have
supported your company since its early days.
Without promoting any particular vendor
solution, this guide is intended to help you to
assess whether the solution you currently have
in place have the scale and power to drive your
business. Should you decide that it is time to
move on, it offers guidance on how you start
defining your wish-list for its replacement,
whichever vendor you ultimately choose.
1. Is your system showing its age?
How do you recognise that your current financial
and accounting software is struggling to cope
with your expectations? What are the signs that
it may be holding back your business, rather than
enabling your growth?
Symptoms include:
>> Processing times are lengthening
>> Too many concurrent uses slows it right down
>> It's crashing more often
>> Upgrades are difficult to implement
>> It doesn't support modern working practices
2. Does your present system provide a
holistic view of your business?
Can you easily view a rounded picture of your
business – your operations, your customers, your
suppliers, your partners – at home and abroad?
Or is information kept in isolated ‘siloes’?
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Is it time to upgrade? 8 questions to help you decide
Is your current system purely focused on financial
transactions, or does it also cover ‘commercials’,
such as stock and warehouse management,
purchasing, contracts, projects, customer
relationship management, sales and marketing…
Do you have information regularly flowing in from
every corner of your business to keep managers
firmly in control?
To give some examples…If you have multiple
warehouse locations, can you collate information
on all stock to avoid wastage and over-ordering?
If several sales people interface with a customer
in different parts of the country, can you roll up
all your dealings with them to understand their
preferences and buying patterns? Are you able
to aggregate and analyse all your purchases with
a supplier to identify opportunities to negotiate
volume discounts?
3. Are you spending more time on gathering
information than using it?
If information is still stored across multiple
software solutions, your staff probably have to
manually ‘hand-carry’ data from one system
to another, a time-consuming and error-prone
process. There is also the risk that information
is being held in individual’s personal systems,
leaving the business vulnerable. The classic
example is the salesman who leaves, taking vital
account information with him.
If you can create a secure ‘corporate memory’
of everything that everyone knows and store it
in a single, centralised location, this becomes an
invaluable asset that you can mine to explore new
opportunities and areas for improvement.
4. Does your software empower users to
access critical business information at any
time from any location?
Having rapid access to business information has
never been more critical to success. Customers
in particular expect an answer now, not in a few
days’ time. Does your current software deliver key
management information to your teams’ mobile
devices to help them to stay in touch, wherever
they are: with a customer, out of the road,
working from home?
Technology nowadays allows your remote and
mobile employees to securely log in and use their
mobile device to carry out tasks such as accessing
a customer’s account details, credit record and
buying history and checking stock availability.
Employees working on-site can enter and gain
approval on timesheets and expenses. Remote
branches can create and manage purchase
orders. Managers will be able to view reports and
key performance indicators from home or when
travelling.
These are just some of the tasks that become
simply the way things work if you have a solution
that is capable of supporting remote and mobile
working. All these activities will be performed in
strict compliance with your established policies
and procedures.
5. Does your system operate in real-time?
The pace of business has accelerated and your
managers need to know what is happening right
now, not last week or even yesterday.
Can your system generate timely information in
easily assimilated formats such as graphs and
charts, so that they can grasp at a glance the
implications of changing conditions? Or are they
still ploughing through spreadsheets and having to
log requests with your IT team to produce reports?
6. Can the software support modern
business practices?
Operating in highly competitive even aggressive
global markets requires businesses to operate as
leanly and efficiently as possible.
>> Automation: Does your present software
support you in meeting the dual challenge
of driving down costs while meeting rising
customer expectations? Does it offer endto-end automation, workflow management,
prompts and alerts to ensure nothing is
overlooked by managers under immense
pressure?
>> Compliance: In an ever more stringent
regulatory climate, does your provider support
your compliance by keeping the software
compliant. You need to be able to take it for
granted that your software will reflect current
legislation.
Is it time to upgrade? 8 questions to help you decide
>> Web technology: Your present software may
not support end-to-end ecommerce, web
ordering or a customer portal for service. If
your back-office systems and your customerfacing web presence system are not completely
joined up, customers may place orders for outof-stock items, leading to disappointment. Your
staff may need to rekey the order details into a
separate system behind the scenes.
>> Cloud hosted solutions: Recognising that
IT support and maintenance are not their
core competences, some companies are
outsourcing this to their system provider
or choosing a hosted solution that delivers
‘on tap’ computing resources without the
overhead of having to make a large, up-front
capital investment in IT, handling day-today technical issues, ensuring security, or
refreshing the technology in the future.
>> If freedom from the cost, complexity and risk
of IT procurement and maintenance sounds
attractive but your current system cannot be
operated in this way, it’s a compelling reason
for seeking an alternative.
>> Business continuity: Recent years have seen
businesses threatened by a range of adverse
conditions, including heavy snow in winter and
floods in summer, as well as the more day-today difficulties of power cuts, transport strikes
and delays, and flu epidemics. Where critical
business applications and data can be securely
accessed remotely, as noted previously, you
empower staff unable to get to the office to
work remotely, phase back into work after sick
leave or work from home should their childcare
arrangements be affected. All this enables you
to maintain ‘business as usual’ till things get
back to normal.
7. Can the software support your growth?
This is the big question. When you bought your
original system, it would have been difficult to
envisage just how much and in what ways your
business would change over time.
Similarly, it’s hard to project forward to what your
business will look like in five or six years’ time.
You will have a long-term plan, but who knows
what will happen in the world economy to change
this? This makes it essential to choose scalable
software with room to grow and to ensure that
your chosen vendor is committed to regularly
updating and enhancing it to reflect the changing
business environment. What is their track record
to date on this?
If your present system has been heavily modified
and added to over the years, it will have become
more difficult to maintain and upgrade. Your new
software should not restrict your organisation’s
growth but evolve with it, by making it easy to add
more users, activate extra functionality and enter
into new markets.
8. What's the cost of doing nothing?
As we said right at the start, the work involved in
replacing your finance and accounting software
will be significant. While any provider worth
their salt will keep disruption to a minimum,
migration does require your users to change
their established ways of working and adopt
new approaches. Many may be quite happy to
chug along with your current system. At least it’s
familiar, whatever its idiosyncrasies.
However, doing nothing comes at a cost: if
your software does not enable and drive your
business, productivity may be impeded, you may
miss out on maximising your purchasing power,
fail to spot threats such as product obsolescence
or a new entrant in the market, over-invest
in stock ‘just in case’ … these are just some
examples of the true impact of doing nothing.
Is it time to upgrade? 8 questions to help you decide
Next steps...
If you decide that your present system is failing
to provide the support outlined above, the next
step is to start defining what you need from
any replacement. Here are some tips:
>> Draw up a list of what you like and don’t like
about your current software and ask your team
to do the same. What does it do well and not
so well?
>> Write a list of ‘must have’ functionality. Don’t
restrict the review to your own department:
who else would they benefit from having
access, in the office and remotely?
>> Consider setting up a product steering
group that includes people from across the
business who would use or be affected by the
implementation of a new system.
>> Think outside the box. Today’s technology
offers new functionality and new ways of
improving efficiency and productivity that you
may never have imagined. This is where talking
to other organisations, attending exhibitions
and webinars as well as requesting product
demonstrations from potential vendors will
reward your investment of time.
More information
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e [email protected]
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