Upgrades equal Downgrades and Where’s the Money?

Upgrades Equal Downgrades

Companies with on-premises systems with limited functionality and rigid integrations obfuscate what is truly going on in the business, dumbing down business intelligence into fingers-crossing guesstimates. Whilst many providers do offer upgrades to their systems and features, many businesses either can’t afford the immediate upgrade, or don’t have the IT resources in house to implement it.

In addition, each upgrade slows down the business engine, requiring a constant game of catch-up. These disturbances end up exhausting time and money.

With a cloud-based, integrated solution, the upgrades happen effortlessly in the background, with scant if any IT involvement required. The business continues to run smoothly as the company receives the latest and greatest functionality and management improves its ability to tell the money story.

Where’s the Money?

To effectively communicate a company’s money story obviously requires knowing where cash is. If the global view of cash is opaque, how can the CFO confidently allocate resources or trim them to profitable advantage? If the finance leader cannot quickly gauge global FX exposures or working capital requirements and changes, how can money be wisely spent or tucked away for the opportunities that present themselves in future? They can’t.

A common concern among growing organisations is international cash management.

Questions abound: Where is the business taking off geographically, and where is it stranded? Which parts of the company are providing the most income, and which are providing the least? Where is capital most needed now, and less needed elsewhere? What is consuming the working capital, hindering the ability to put this money to work? How can nimble adjustments be made to inventory, payables and sales to invest in opportunities as they appear? What impact is the global tax strategy having on access to cash in various countries or regions? Can management see its foreign liquidity and tax exposures in any currency?

Whether a business is at the stage where it has these questions, or the stage before these questions are unearthed, business leaders need to have access to real-time business data, else they can’t tell the money story. In order to tell the story, they need their financial management tools to link seamlessly with systems used across the rest of the business.