The five financial management growing pains that stunt organisations

Business growth starts and ends in the finance department. If you don’t have the right financial software to back up your organisation’s growth, it’s going to stifle your efforts.

Your software package (or even spreadsheet!) might have been helpful in the early days. However, as time goes on and your financial function becomes ever more complicated, you might find that your financial management system becomes less and less useful.

As your organisation grows, has your financial software grown with it? If you think your organisation is being held back by a clunky or basic financial management system, you need to be on the lookout for the five tell-tale signs of financial management growing pains.

Excessive manual labour

Your financial management system should automate low-value, high-effort tasks. That’s what it exists for.

However, all too often, financial departments can become bogged down in manual processes because their financial system struggles to automate their everyday tasks. You shouldn’t be bogged down in purchase orders, budgets, reconciliation and approvals.

Complicated reporting

It’s crucial to be able to easily demonstrate your organisation’s expansion. Financial software should come with powerful reporting that can be accessed at the push of a button.

If you find reporting to be a complicated, time-sucking data entry exercise, your financial software isn’t up to the task. The best software packages come complete with a full suite of reports that scale with your organisation.

Lack of scalability

As your organisation grows, you will need to manage a sprawling set of locations, each of which will often have their own processes and management teams. This can lead to delayed and disjointed finances and duplication of financial data, especially if you’re still manually sending spreadsheets between locations.

These organisations need access to a single, ultimate version of the truth. The ideal solution is cloud-based unified ledger software; whenever a change is made to your financial data, it’s updated instantly across all locations. This means there can be no confusion – regardless of how many locations your organisation operates in.

Endless record-keeping

Are you struggling to keep records and manually recording your invoices for HMRC? The recent changes to financial obligations brought on by Making Tax Digital have highlighted the importance of preparedness – if you don’t have a robust audit trail, you could be setting yourself up for disaster.

However, managing your records is an endless and thankless task, especially if your financial data exists across multiple databases.

Your software should be designed to help you meet your compliance and record-keeping obligations, not to obfuscate it. Look for software packages that come with automated audit trails, so you don’t have to keep a manual record.

Dubious financial security

If you’re not sure whether your financial data is regularly backed up and secured, you might be setting yourself up for disaster. Your financial management system needs to offer your growing organisation peace of mind with protection against data theft, extortion and data loss.

Again, cloud-based systems can offer a convenient solution, as all your security issues will be handled by your supplier.

IRIS Financials offer market-leading cloud financial software for organisations of every size. To find out more about our financial management system, contact us today for a free demonstration.