1) Absence of Real-time reporting: Entry level software capabilities are typically inadequate to provide consolidated views & real-time information. This is mainly because employees are dependent on data spread across spreadsheets to fill the gaps in their information. Also, the organization resorts to manual operation for non-existing functionality such as for reconciling customer and debtor information, or in costing of bought out or manufactured items. In such situations organizations may also implement stand-alone applications and encounter challenges in integrating the same with the basic accounting software. This causes obvious delays in processing and reporting. When information access and availability take longer or becomes difficult, it is an indication that the business needs have outgrown the software.

To add to this, if subsidiaries were to employ different financial software, then manually moving data between systems would lead to manual errors adding to further data inaccuracies. Without real time data & accurate information, the management team would lack insights & visibility on business’s performance.

2) Integrations with disparate systems: A typical accounting software is not built to manage increasing customers, vendors, inventory & orders. The key driver for expansion & success lies in greater transaction volumes & quick consolidations, but most of such software cannot tackle such kind of pressure. Complete audit trails, intelligent business planning, real-time reporting & automated workflows would need to integrate additional applications & systems. In absence of a perfect integration, one is only contributing to the hairball of spreadsheets. Also, such stand-alone software cannot manage stronger financial controls or support complex financial processes like subscription billing & invoicing.

According to a study published by the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA), the most critical challenges faced by accounting & finance teams today are integrating disparate business systems, adding business intelligence software & replacing disparate systems with a single business suite & database.

NetSuite with its suite of business management applications solves such industry specific problems with ease and finesse.

3) Excessive Manual Intervention: Incompatibilities between systems & imperfect integrations have left employees with manual movement of data causing manual errors & reporting delays. Employees are spending large business hours every week entering order information into the invoicing system, while someone from sales is copying invoice details into sales compensation spreadsheet.

Such manual data entry leads to invoice queries, which when not resolved in-time may lead to month end crisis. Simple processes like expense claim approvals or routine contract signatures are taking a few days to weeks to finalize when paperwork is passed around to be validated with information from disparate systems. With data lying around in disparate systems, it gets difficult to get real-time information in the right format for trend analysis, so employees fill the data gap with guess work instead of actual data that is hard to find.

In today’s highly networked world, not having access to real-time data & having to wait around, while data is manually moved from multiple systems, frustrates suppliers, customer & business owners. They could be spending their business hours making business impacting decisions with real-time perfect insights.