You’re drowning in spreadsheets; month-end is always a nightmare and the reports are out of date before you even click ‘send’. You need a new finance system to reduce the amount of time you spend on manual, repetitive work. This will also enable you to produce the business intelligence every company needs.
Here’s how you can build a business case that will convince your boss to invest in new accounting software.
Step 1: The Problem
Demonstrate the issues with your current finance system
Draw on the insights and experience of your team to understand the finance systems, resources and processes already in place. Their perspectives will be crucial to estimating how much this problem you’re trying to solve is costing your company. Getting all the key people involved at an early stage also helps you get cross-functional buy-in to your project.
Humanise the problem with examples of your accounting challenges.
Here are challenges you could highlight:
1. How long it takes to produce month-end figures or management reports manually in Excel
2. Inconsistencies in month-end data across different systems in the business
3. How often the finance team has to repost data
4. How much time they waste on repetitive tasks that could be automated
5. Accrual levels
6. Swings in working capital or unexplained variations in margins
7. Your lack of granular data.
You could also do a quick internal survey and ask non-finance users:
- How confident are you in the reliability/accuracy of the business unit reports?
- How timely are the reports?
- Do the reports have the detail you need, such as cost centre revenue and department expenditure, to make informed decisions?
Step 2: The Solution
Paint a picture of what the finance function will look like when you have a modern system in place.
You’ll be scale-up ready
The time and cost savings modern tech brings will give finance extra capacity. That means you can provide extra support and valuable services, such as investment case analysis, across the business.
Remove growth obstacles
A finance team that’s head down in manual data processing and reconciliation is an obstacle to growth. Adopting a modern finance system is an opportunity to shift that mindset.
Giving finance teams time and space brings many, if less tangible, benefits. For example they can:
- Analyse data to identify improvements
- Think creatively to solve problems
- Lead conversations with other departments to uncover the business stories the data is telling them
- Transform the way finance is seen across the business.
Create a data culture
Research suggests only 17%* of UK workers are confident in their data literacy skills and 67% feel overwhelmed or unhappy when working with data. *Computer Weekly
As proactive advisors, finance will be ideally placed to coach and build data confidence across the business.
Step 3: The Value
You need real world examples of the value you’ll gain from your new finance system. Check out these customer success stories from growing companies to help illustrate your business case. You’ll find evidence of finance teams that have shaved 25 days off their month-end, successfully dealt with major increases in transaction volumes and instantly produce consolidated accounts all on one platform.
Find out more about Cloud accounting software for growing companies
Download our eBook 'How to find the finance system to take you from start-up to scale-up'.
Join us for coffee and a demo of AccountsIQ on 24 February.
