Accounting and Financial Management

Most business financial management solutions are created to assist in complying with Sarbanes-Oxley, BASEL II, and other regulations by providing rules-based financial controls and full audit trails. Many accounting software solutions allow you to simulate potential financial developments so you can more easily predict how major financial decisions will impact your company’s position.

Key Benefits of Business Accounting and Business Financial Software
With business financial management solutions in place, businesses can transform their financial operations from administrative back-office functions to strategic assets by increasing their accounts receivables as well as maximizing their cash flow. Additionally, business accounting software helps companies identify and understand factors that can positively or negatively impact a company’s performance, growth, and profitability.

What’s more, business financial management software speeds up the closing cycle by automating associated workflows as well as report generation, thus reducing the time necessary for complete budgeting and planning. Implementing an business accounting solution minimizes the risk of audit as well by ensuring that internal and external documents and reports are entirely accurate.

Finally, business accounting and business financial software helps you implement formal internal controls in order to facilitate compliance with federal and state regulations, as well as improve corporate governance. Leveraging more efficient financial analysis in order to enhance decision-making within your company also helps with your performance management by allowing you to measure results versus objectives.

Business financial management software delivers comprehensive capabilities calculated to dramatically improve every aspect of financial planning, control, management, and analysis. Though the modules and sub-modules vary depending on the vendor, all accounting and financial management software offers the following features in one way or another:

General Ledger – Provides greater control and in-depth visibility into accounts receivables, payroll expenses, accounts payable, orders, and related financial transactions. Financial personnel can also perform quick, systematic consolidations, combining numerous ledgers from different business units into one financial statement.

Controlling and budgeting – Tools that allow for more accurate internal and time accounting, cost accounting, product costing (i.e. cost of goods sold analysis), and enterprise and departmental budget creation and management.

Cash Management – Helps predict and assess cash requirements, perform reconciliations, and process/execute transactions that can directly influence cash flow.

Forecasting – Helps you accurately anticipate future losses or profits, cash flows, revenues, and other financial factors important to the health of your company.

Fixed Asset Management – Enables more efficient asset portfolio management through simplifying the acquisition, evaluation, maintenance, operation, and valuation of fixed capital.

In addition to providing key features such as general ledger, accounts receivable and payable, extensive reporting, and more, there are certain capabilities that a business needs to take into account when choosing a financial management solution. Here are a few things CFOs and financial managers should consider when deciding upon accounting software:

Global/International Capabilities – Most companies operate on a global scale, even the small and mid-sized ones, so finding an accounting and financial management solution with comprehensive international transaction support, such as multi-lingual and multi-currency capabilities, is important.

Financial Strategy – An accounting and financial management solution should support financial strategy in addition to management. Choosing a vendor that offers comprehensive and efficient “what-if” analysis features is vital so that you can analyze multiple business conditions and scenarios before you need to make critical, strategic decisions.

Security – Given the fact that financial data is extremely sensitive in nature, it’s also important to take a hard look at what kind of security each solution provides. This consideration is particularly important for companies that use web-based environments where security is always of the utmost concern.

Deployment and Usability – Be sure to methodically assess a solution’s usability and ease of deployment. Since disrupting financial processes is never an option for a company, even for the shortest possible period of time. Your financial management solution must have a rapid implementation cycle as well as minimal training so that your employees can get acquainted with the solution as quickly as possible.