Partner of Eventus Advisory Group, LLC. , which helps corporations fulfill their CFO, FINANCE and accounting wishes with divided teams.
If you’re a finance or accounting manager, sales reps will likely introduce you to a new reporting tool or a business resource planning (ERP) system. Each promises to “save you time and money,” “help you make more important decisions,” and “get you out of the hell of spreadsheets. “But if you have ERP war scars, you know that ERP implementations fail occasionally. I’m very pro-tech, but for specific and well-thought-out use cases. I wrote the following article to explain when it makes sense to present the generation and where the risk is valued.
Criteria for technology integration
I divided the operational generation of finance/accounting into two fields: power and effectiveness. Efficiency responses are what save you time and money and increase accuracy. Efficiency helps you make better decisions.
The traps of “saving time”
What does it mean to save time?Does stored time save value?What will you do with stored time?Time savings fall into two categories: you can eliminate some or all of a job, or you can make a faster decision/process.
When getting rid of a job, you can’t remove a partial boss. If you cannot identify the person(s) who will be fired by implementing the new technology, saving cash on the count there. purposes for which the stored time will be used, then there is no genuine stored power. The stark truth is that maximum “time savings” simply speed up existing processes without any genuine hardware gain. While it’s wonderful to make life less difficult for your team members, are the few hours of savings worth tens of thousands, if not thousands of dollars in time, implementation, and maintenance costs?
If the generation wants to speed up a procedure or make a resolution, ask yourself what you would do with that extra time. What will happen materially if you can act faster?If you quantify the profit, then it is more complicated to justify the investment.
What does a “better decision” look like?
Reports and metrics are as smart as the movements they trigger. When you say that a report or a new generation will help you make more important decisions, or more important “data-driven” decisions, ask yourself the following questions:
1. For which would you like to have more data?
2. Si had this data, or if I had it faster, what would the “best” resolution look like?
3. How much would you earn or save with the “best” decision?
If you can’t think about the vital decisions you would make with the generation that comes your way, you probably won’t value the investment.
The Gains of Automation in Finance and Accounting
Most likely, you will be presented with an automation tool. Some procedures are wonderful for automation. Examine each procedure through the prism of procedure rather than judgment. Automating judgment is expensive and time-consuming. You can get the most productive price for cash by simply automating direction and responsibilities based on criteria. If the generation is helping to pass judgment on better, so much the better. But taking judgment out of the hands of the decision-maker exposes you to more wonderful dangers than prospective reward, in my opinion.
A non-unusual list of popular processes to automate:
1. Travel and (T
2. Refunds.
3. Banking services and links to the general ledger.
4. Acquisitions.
Each of those processes is based on criteria and requires a significant amount of manual effort.
Practical with build deployments
The generation is great, yet Satan is in the operational details. Make sure you have an intelligent answer to the following questions before contemplating any generation.
1. Who will be in charge of the implementation?
This will be a combination of your in-house team, whether you’re a generation helper and subject matter experts, as well as an external implementer, unless you have a very strong program control office. Quickly identify those other people and get their commitment to allocation and time investment, or threaten to fail implementation. Do not get budget approval from external resources.
2. Who will be to blame for sustaining the generation once it is implemented?Do you have the in-house skills or want to hire?
Determine this temporarily and get commitments in terms of time and budgets before starting implementation. If you want to rent outdoors from your company, make sure you have a schedule, task specifications, and HR/recruiting resources. that operational procedures on generation control are reviewed and approved through IT and users before going too far into implementation. This will help avoid a gap between what you think you were buying and what you implemented.
Wrapping up
The simplest measure to compare any implementation of a monetary or accounting generation is whether the gains from increased decision-making and savings in time/money outweigh the prices (money and time) of implementation and maintenance. Answer whether the profits provided will be used and materialized, and you have a smart criterion style for comparing monetary and accounting generation.
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Partner of Eventus Advisory Group, LLC. , which helps corporations fulfill their CFO, FINANCE and accounting wishes with divided teams. Read Aaron Spool’s full profile
Partner of Eventus Advisory Group, LLC. , which helps corporations fulfill their CFO, FINANCE and accounting wishes with divided teams. Read Aaron Spool’s full profile here.