A financial reboot can be time-consuming and extremely difficult, as any CFO who has undertaken the process will know. However the events of the last few years have forced many CFOs to undertake a financial reboot, which requires a multitude of resources and careful planning and can be an expensive prospect, particularly without the latter.
It is now of vital importance for finance to be able to step up to the plate if they are to stay abreast of the changing needs and strategies of their business.
Financial reboots can have a transformative effect on the finance function, resulting in the achievement of superior business outcomes by embracing technology and having financial processes streamlined.
A real financial reboot is achieved via a mix of cultural, process and system change. It would make little financial sense to invest in a technological overhaul if that new tech can then not be used by your finance team.
There are a number of important features that financial advisor software should possess in order to power your financial reboot.
Remote Working/Collaboration Tools
Remote working has become normalised as a result of the global pandemic and has resulted in a greater reliance on technology for the purpose of collaboration and getting work done. Many businesses have discovered their legacy solutions were too reliant on IT and have become an obstacle to enterprise collaborations in finance areas such as finance departments.
This also increases the importance of cloud solutions for a financial reboot, which need to be accessible to various staff members who may be located in many different places all over the world in order to create greater transparency in working. A team that continues to be reliant on manual financial methods will find this more difficult when remote working and cause more erroneous data.
What to Ask a Software Vendor
There are a number of critical questions that a business should ask a software vendor before employing their software to help in their financial reboot.
Businesses need to make sure the software will be available in the cloud and not just on premises, that their data can be securely accessed at any time and from anywhere, that it makes for easy collaboration with trading partners, and that different team members will be able to edit the same documents and data at the same time from different locations.
It is also important that data is updated in real time and that there is a complete audit trail that can check who has made changes and when. If the software is cloud-based a business needs to know how reliable and secure it is, if the cloud scale will be able to cope with the demands of that business, and if more IT staff will need to be hired to handle moving to the cloud.
Modern finance teams need to be able to work from any device that is in any location and at any time. Moving to a cloud solution is not just a tech upgrade but a way of redefining and helping to reboot a finance organisation.
A successful financial reboot will have a positive impact on everyone in your business.