Outdated financial software could be costing your business
It’s often said that we’ve become a “throwaway society”- there’s always an upgrade or an updated model on the market that’s offering something newer, better, shinier...
Businesses have long had to foot the bill for ongoing and expensive hardware purchases and updates for employees – be it new laptops, phones, etc. – it's a cost of doing business and ensuring your people have the right tools to do their job effectively.
The same can be said when it comes to software investments, but they are often overlooked and could be costing your business dearly.
4 minutes
Written by Kit Morris
Introduction
With millions of hours wasted on financial admin tasks every year, the risks of outdated software in a modern finance team are huge.
Outdated financial software, lacking automation and smart augmentations, often leaves staff stuck with a stream of repetitive and time-consuming tasks. From the hours spent collecting month-end reports to manually updating each figure of payroll information and checking on supplier payments, an enormous amount of time is spent on tasks that add no value to the business, and are incredibly prone to error as employees move between disjointed systems..
An outdated finance system also means that finance leads can struggle to keep track of when projects overrun, which is both costly and impacts other streams of work.
But one of the major long-term disadvantages of not updating software, in any form of business, is often overlooked – and that is the risk of missed opportunity. Modern integrated finance management systems like those we offer at Access can help your determine new opportunities for growth, and to understand the areas of your business where change may be needed.
Is outdated financial software holding your business back? Discover our leading financial software solutions today and why switching your software could be the best decision you make all year.
5 ways outdated software could damage your business
1. Inaccuracy
Accurate financial reporting is only possible when you have access to real-time, up-to-date information. Once you have reached the stage where software incompatibilities force you to manually key in data every day, the potential for errors rises significantly. This can cause all sorts of problems.
Furthermore, the longer you use an outdated system, the greater the risk of data corruption and the loss of updated data due to automatic resets. Switching to a new financial reporting system significantly reduces those risks.
2. Disorganisation
Over time, growing businesses tend to gather a lot of excess data, documents and records of interaction.
Even the most diligent worker will find that there comes a point when the software is no longer adequate for the task. Important documents and data can be lost within the system and retrieving data can take a lot longer than it should. This is compounded by the fact that older systems are simply not designed to handle as much data as the newer ones.
With Access Financial Management software, accurate team monitoring means finance leads can understand more accurately and more clearly where a project stands and how much time is spent on it. This helps to avoid costly overruns.
3. Inefficiency
In business, time is money. Every year millions of hours are wasted on manually retyping and rekeying data into new documents as part of financial admin. This is especially true for businesses that do not have integrated financial systems, as a significant amount of time must be spent to compensate for this. Automated systems help to eliminate this wasted time by completely removing any need for manual rekeying.
4. Security risks
Using outdated software of any kind exposes you to an increased risk of being hacked and having data destroyed or stolen. As Verizon’s 2019 Data Breach Investigation Report shows, there are few areas more sensitive than finance. The fact is that when you use a new system from a reliable supplier, less time has been available to criminals to work out how to undermine it. Your finance and business data will be backed up via secured systems so they will be much less vulnerable to hacking, loss and theft.
Improved software integration also reduces the vulnerabilities in your system. By reducing the need for manual input, your business will be able to conform to data security regulations more easily, without running the risk of any important financial data being lost or stolen.
5. Impeded reporting capacity
Older finance software lacks the capacity to display real-time data, making it harder for your staff to produce accurate reports. Being able to create dashboards from selected information, even when working at speed, makes it much easier to visualise the whole task when preparing board reports or information packs for senior staff. This lets staff produce more complete and cohesive materials in a shorter time frame, improving efficiency and increasing the organisation’s ability to react quickly to changing events.
With Access Financial Management software you can generate clear, automated analytics.
Comparison of real-time data, from a variety of sources throughout the business and accessed via a central dashboard, gives much greater assistance to decision makers.
Our leading financial management and accounting software is designed to improve business-wide efficiency via advanced functionality and seamless automation. Reports are generated automatically so that instead of hours spent creating insights for the end of each month or year, your people will become more autonomous. The time spent by accounting staff on performing repetitive tasks is freed up by the automation of the system, allowing them to spend time working on more productive and complex tasks.
Taken together, these factors illustrate the importance of upgrading and updating finance and accounting software. Failure to make necessary upgrades promptly can harm a company in many ways, eating away at its day-to-day efficiency and damaging its reputation when it leads to errors, putting the business at a serious disadvantage.
