How to Solve the Top 3 Challenges Facing Today’s Finance Organizations

In the work I have done as an ex-CPA and expert advisor to businesses on finance, operations and marketing automation, these concerns are no surprise.  But I would surmise further that these concerns are nothing new.

If they are nothing new, why are we still talking about them?  Can’t we solve this and move on?  I suspect the two areas to focus which can make a difference is as follows:

1. Practices
2. Computing Architecture

What’s Required to Address these Concerns?

In my mind, I suspect that “Streamlining Processes and Increased Productivity”, the first item on the list, clearly can be helped with better tools.  But I have witnessed clients with really good tools still have process breakdowns.   As such, I believe that the real culprit is management care which is the owner of organizational practices.    Hence, management will need to design better practices and develop improved skills in their people to produce on this goal.   Tools really are just capacity.  People must act with that capacity.  Management is responsible for ensuring people can and do act powerful with their tools.

The next item, “Improving the Management Reporting Cycle”, has much to do with capturing high quality data, and then getting data out to the right people.  Like the first item, it also has much to do with management.  Meaning, management is responsible for holding people accountable for what is on a report.  Without management’s care, information quality is lower and trust in the data that  reports offer  is lower.  Once trust goes, all kinds of other issues emerge.   It’s back to practices and this may include sharpening the tool (added new fields, etc.)

The third item, “Achieving Real-time Visibility across your Organization”, in my mind, has much to do with computing architecture.   The “best-of-breed” approach, which litters the organization with every department’s favorite business application, thwarts management’s intention to see information real-time.  Why?  Because data must, at best, be integrated to other applications; or at worse, it must be put together in a reporting system to stitch it together.  Even when “best-of-breed” systems are integrated, the need for a “yet another” reporting system is required.    See my article, “Best-of-Breed: Traps & Lies” for more in-depth analysis.

There is no quick hit to solve the concerns above.   However,  I believe that selecting the better computing architecture can improve the chances of meeting these goals.  The reason NetSuite is a strong candidate to help solve these concerns is because it is fully-integrated.   Meaning, it can address business concerns that start in marketing and end up as cash receipts in accounting.  The NetSuite Platform is designed to address the majority of the areas of the business.  And where it doesn’t address a transactional business concern out-of-the-box, the platform can easily be natively extended to adapt with relative ease.   Full-integration means that information is real-time and connected.  Information elements can be reported on across departments without shuttling data to a third-party report writer.

However, even with NetSuite, management must be committed to these goals.  Too many times I have seen companies make investments in business tools, like NetSuite, but then a fall-down in ongoing development to design, maintain, and refine powerful organizational practices to realize streamlined operations.   Some may call this “process”, but at the end of the day, this is about people understanding and knowing how to produce powerful coordination orchestrated by strong leadership and a well-designed business system.