As businesses grow, the number of business systems often increases. Finance teams need a centralized platform for finance operations and reporting.
However, for teams trying to steer the business and optimize operations in this mixed IT environment, several challenges arise:
- Difficulty in reporting and analyzing data from multiple systems – Different systems may have different charts of accounts and posting logic, making it hard to aggregate data accurately. Teams risk "adding apples and oranges" when combining datasets.
- Multiple versions of the truth and extensive reconciliation efforts – Teams spend excessive time agreeing on which dataset to use and making adjustments, rather than analyzing data and drawing insights.
- Data quality and synchronization issues – Aggregating data from multiple sources often leads to problems with version control, duplicates, and inconsistent data, especially when handling large volumes of information.
- Limited agility to respond to changing business requirements – Without a unified view, finance teams struggle to make fast, informed decisions to guide the business.
- Time-consuming offline processes and reporting – Manually compiled data quickly becomes outdated. For example, aggregating receivables for a complex customer operating across multiple ERPs in Excel may miss newly opened sales orders or recent transactions, reducing visibility into risk exposure.
- Shared services inefficiencies – Performing processes in multiple variants across systems prevents standardization, limits scalability, and increases process costs.
