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4 key financial management software benefits

Whether you run a conglomerate or a construction company—an accurate picture of your financial situation is critical to success and growth. Modern financial management software gives owners and managers faster access to better insights about payables, receivables, fixed assets, and other key financial data points.

As part of a comprehensive enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, a modern financial management system lets you view and manage critical financial and operational information from easy-to-use dashboards that integrate all financial and business data within a single platform.

Here are four key benefits that businesses gain by running their operations with financial management software:


1: Take control of company finances

Any quality financial management system will include core bookkeeping functions to track income and expenses, assets and liabilities, and depreciation to produce accurate financial statements.

Transform bookkeeping basics

The more closely you can track payables and receivables, the more easily and accurately you can plan for growth and respond to the unexpected. Financial management software allows you to track payables, receivables, assets, and liabilities in real time, keeping the general ledger up to date and simplifying balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement preparation.

Many of these systems help you automate processes related to payables and receivables, eliminating manual processes and enabling companies to shorten transaction cycles and identify transactions that fall outside established norms—protecting a company’s revenue stream and credit standing.

Tip

Business doesn’t stand still—and neither do your people. Consider a financial management system that provides data access and analysis on the go and on multiple devices.

Anticipate change with intelligent insights

Today’s most advanced financial management systems help you do that by incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide insights into future cashflow; predicting when invoices will be paid and turning unexpected shortfalls into foreseeable events that can be planned for.

Such systems also streamline the process of preparing and maintaining detailed short- and long-term budgets, keeping business on track and enabling more informed strategic planning.


2: Simplify and automate financial processes

The best financial management platforms on the market support advanced features for greater visibility and insight as well as cloud connectivity for access anytime, anywhere. These systems deliver sophisticated financial management capability and automated workflows that take management and reporting activities to a higher level.

Streamline expense management

Manual expense management creates time-consuming tasks for workers, managers, and finance teams. A modern financial management system simplifies the process of completing and submitting expense reports by employees and reduces the time that the finance department spends to reconcile and approve them.

Tip

Get more from your data. The embedded AI and machine learning inside top-tier financial platforms brings business intelligence to business transactions.

Monitor and manage transactions

A financial management system’s cash and bank management functionality simplifies the maintenance of a company’s bank accounts as well as the financial instruments associated with those bank accounts—such as deposit slips, checks, bills of exchange, and promissory notes—and streamlines bank statement reconciliation.

Take control of costs

Cost accounting capabilities built into advanced financial management software allow a company’s management team to capture and evaluate all of the fixed and variable costs associated with production. That adds tremendous flexibility and simplicity to the cost accounting process, enabling the team to see deviations from established standards and make adjustments to help control costs going forward.

The most advanced systems allow users to import data from multiple financial data repositories—across entities and currencies—to get a truly global view of a company’s financial standing.


3: Increase visibility across the organization

With financial management capabilities integrated into your ERP system, business leaders and managers can access valuable data from across the organization to improve the accuracy of budgets, reports, and forecasts. That makes it easier for everyone to assess the impact that financial decisions have on operations and vice versa.

Get a better view of where you stand

Best-in-class financial management systems include business intelligence tools that present comprehensive, customizable dashboards for a comprehensive look at a company’s financial standing as well as access to related financial reports and the ability to drill down to line-item details for a close examination of underlying transaction data. Finance and management professionals gain real-time visibility to key metrics and highly accurate reports that drive better business decisions.

Tip

When evaluating financial management platforms, look for one that’s at least as global as your company. Choose a system that’s capable of supporting the regulatory requirements of all the countries where you operate.

Gain a global perspective

For multinational organizations, a sophisticated financial management system enables finance professionals to quickly adapt to changing local and global financial requirements and manage frequently changing national and regional tax, regulatory, and reporting requirements to ensure compliance and reduce risk.

Using the cloud, modern financial management systems enable authorized personnel throughout the company and around the world to view, analyze, and update key data and metrics in real time anywhere and from any device.


4: Improve business planning and forecasting

From budgeting to long-range planning to assessing the impact of mergers and acquisitions, a modern financial management system enables finance professionals to more accurately assess and evaluate the effects of planned or potential business decisions on the company’s financial standing in the future.

Drive more informed business decisions

A robust financial management system allows business and finance leaders to create data-driven budgets to plan and control operations. These systems streamline setup and maintenance of detailed workforce budgets to simplify position and compensation planning and enable you to create fixed asset budgets that calculate depreciation and record planned transactions related to those assets.

You can also build project budgets that include details about planned hours, expenses, and fees, and generate demand forecasts to estimate future inventory demand based on historical transaction data.

Develop advanced financial models

Financial management software makes it easy to create sophisticated financial models that enable businesses to assess its current valuation as well as that of its peers or competitors. Companies can also develop models to forecast sales growth, the viability of proposed projects, and the impact of possible mergers or anticipated economic conditions on the business.


Drive innovation with a modern financial management system

With a modern cloud-connected financial management system in place, your organization gains deep visibility into the financial health of your business and improved financial performance. By automating financial operations, you enable your finance teams to spend less time on manual processes and instead focus their energy on strategies that move your business forward.

Start improving financial management in your business

Discover how financial management software elevates budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and decision making with data-driven insights. Explore Dynamics 365 Finance or request a free trial to see how one of the industry’s most comprehensive finance platforms transforms the way business works.