Navigating cash and treasury: 5. Modernize the core of financial management

Do your systems lack the ability to achieve complete cash visibility?

Today, financial services organizations are more focused on what’s necessary to safeguard business continuity and solvency. Much of this begins with greater visibility and reliability of key data to help drive your critical business decisions, especially during critical market changes.

Our current blog series is reviewing cash and treasury best practices you can follow to prepare for instant payments and build true cash visibility. In the previous post, we reviewed best practices to establish intraday liquidity monitoring capabilities. This week, we discuss the modernization of financial management.

Consideration #5: Modernize the core of financial management

Many of the best practices mentioned in this blog series require the use of specific digital tools. According to the ERP Advisor Group: “Legacy technology may not do what it supposed to do anymore or what you need it to do anymore. Processes change over time, businesses shift over time, and the application might not be able to track exactly what you need now, or in the future, even though it was perfect for what you needed in the past. If your legacy software isn’t doing what you need it to do, it may be time to upgrade to an application that can do exactly what you need.”

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Cash and treasury: Prepare for instant payments and build true cash visibility

A modern financial ERP system, however, should come with the necessary functionality already built in—or at least be part of a digital ecosystem that’s designed for seamless integration with other financial tools. A modern ERP system should also provide dynamic scalability that allows businesses to adjust to changes in processing volume as demands fluctuate.

Modern ERP systems must be intuitive and easy-to-use, with access to cloud services that deliver a highly resilient, fault tolerant, scalable, and secure environment that serves as the foundation for an organization’s entire enterprise ecosystem.

Considerations

• ERP as a data warehouse—Modern ERP systems go beyond simple financial capabilities, such as account entity, accounting unit, account, and project. Modern ERP systems include customizable dimensions, such as supplier, channel, market segment, and more. Modern ERP systems can even provide data warehousing with near-real-time profitability and cash flow across a redesigned dimensional string.
  
  

• A role-based user experience—Modernizing an organization’s financial management process requires tools that operate anytime, anywhere, on any device that fosters collaboration across corporate groups. A modern ERP system should also provide dashboards, reports, data visualization, and proactive analytics capabilities that work across systems to deliver information automatically based on users’ specific roles and priorities.
  

A modern financial ERP system can transform the very core of an organization’s internal financial management. It can help optimize cost efficiency and drive enterprise growth by accelerating areas such as digital transformation, robotic process automation, data visualization, and advanced analytics.

Next week, we’ll look at how you can build true cash visibility, gain complete liquidity monitoring, and launch your new payments infrastructure, and recap our blog series.

If you would like to discover more about modernizing the core of financial management, we invite you to download this eBook eBook on how to prepare for instant payments and build true cash visibility.