Here’s Why Your Financial Management Tools Should Be Working Together

Miriam runs a successful tech startup. Like most growing organizations, she was swamped with setting up her software stack. She found tools that addressed specific needs, evaluated them, and gave access to different teams. Different functional areas used various disjointed systems even though they shared a lot of information.

As a result, key data had to be entered over and over, and she was never sure if her data was up to date or real-time. Her staff were often bogged down by mundane, repetitive tasks while they could be focusing on strategic financial analysis.

Is this starting to sound a lot like your organization?

Businesses usually don’t see the importance of an integrated financial management system until it’s too late. These disparate tools satisfy short-term revenue goals, but hold them back from achieving long-term efficiency and stability.

4 benefits of an integrated system of financial management software

By adopting an integrated financial management tool, you can drastically improve the speed, accuracy, and efficiency of your financial data.

1. No more double entries

When you use siloed software for finance, data has to be relayed to the different teams, either in a spreadsheet or emails. The other teams have to key in this data manually into their systems, which leads to a tremendous waste of time and productivity.

Take expense reporting software, for instance. Employees submit their expense reports to their managers to claim reimbursements. When approved, the reimbursement has to be added to the payroll data. Also, the accounting department needs to record it as a business expense. When all these systems aren’t integrated, it becomes a tedious process where the same information is entered again and again in multiple systems, by different people.

However, that’s not the case when you use integrated financial software. Any new information is automatically updated in all relevant systems.

2. Data integrity

Your business decisions are only as good as your data. If you can’t be sure that your data is accurate, up-to-date, and relevant, then it’s probably time to seriously consider software integrations. When you have multiple databases with overlapping data, there’s every chance that at least one of the systems has outdated data. However, if all these systems are connected, changes to one database will reflect in the rest and you can rest assured that your data is consistent across systems.

3. 360-degree reports

Reports showing performances across different functional areas are crucial to give you the holistic picture of your finance business processes. The communication, or lack thereof, between these apps, results in an incomplete picture of your financial health. With an integrated financial management system, you can easily consolidate data from all teams and extract relevant information. As a result, predictions and forecasts can be made with improved accuracy.

4. More-informed decisions

Centralized access to key information is one of the most important drivers in making strategic decisions. Typically, businesses spend a lot of time and resources extracting data from multiple sources, tying them together, consolidating them, and making sense of the information. This, coupled with the fact that the data they’re acting upon may not be accurate, results in slow, uninformed decisions.

When information can be accessed from anywhere without wasting resources and time, business leaders are in a better position to make smarter and faster decisions. There’s more transparency, and you can be confident that you have all factual data before you make important decisions.

Building an ecosystem of well-connected apps

The growing complexities of the business arena demand a seamless, smooth flow of data from one tool to another; a hodgepodge of disconnected software is not going to cut it. Building an ecosystem of finance software has become a necessity in today’s competitive world, to stay ahead of the competition. That’s where options like Kissflow Finance & Ops Cloud can help.

Kissflow offers an end-to-end tightly knit cloud platform for financial process automation. Get your free demo today.