5 reasons for integrating your ERP financial data with FP&A
Nearly all organizations have two foundations they rely on for success: people and finances. How you optimize these two resources will dictate your success, whether that’s fulfilling a mission, providing a service, or simply turning a profit.
Similarly, the main benefit of enterprise resources management (ERP) is that it unites your financial, planning, operational, and people data, along with a suite of other business functions, so that you can manage them optimally.
In this blog, we are going to discuss why the integration of financial data through FP&A and ERP with other key organizational functions, and the collaboration it allows, can bring a large amount of value to an organization.
Advanced reporting capabilities
When financial reports need to be generated, they need holistic data to be accurate. In other words, the data siloes created by legacy systems can lead to inaccurate budgeting or forecasting reports. With integrated data, you can create a report that takes everything into account, without great effort.
Two organizational functions, such as finance and HR, can communicate and pass information to each other that is up-to-date, and reports can then be accurate and represent the reported situation as realistically as possible.
Better decision making
With clearer reports, and integrated data, C-suite executives and managers alike can make better decisions with confidence. With a single source of truth, it’s much easier to know that what you are looking at represents a whole, rather than only a fraction of what’s occurring. So, when decisions need to be made, they can be made confidently with accurate data that is trusted and easier to get a granular view of in just a couple of clicks.
Importantly, the decision maker can get a better understanding of the consequences of their decision before they make it. When managers and employees are well informed about their organizational data they can both collaborate and work more effectively together, leading to more informed decisions from both parties.
Inform strategy
In the modern business world, CFOs and their FP&A teams are expected to inform strategy and be major players in the C-suite rather than just offering financial management. To provide strategic insight, financial teams need to regain control of their data to effectively forecast more robustly.
You can’t look to the future without a pre-existing and accurate understanding of your entire business. To be able to forecast accurately, you need to understand all your data and how each individual function affects the organization as a whole.
With integrated data, data consolidation times will be reduced allowing for teams to focus on tasks like forecasting which is much easier with full visibility of data. Legacy systems that rely on siloed data will struggle with forecasting when it’s harder to process and analyze fragmented data.
Click to read FP&A product brochure gated
Improved productivity
When data is integrated across departments it makes it easier for teams to utilize and re-purpose the data itself, improving efficiency across the board.
When your employees can easily create accurate reports with the push of a button, without the endless over-reliance on Excel spreadsheets, this allows them to spend their time on other key skills like analysis, forecasting, and crafting storytelling skills with real insight.
Integrated financial data like this can help your organization move from simply managing data and making it work to an organization that can analyze its data and use it to look forward to the future. When data is optimized like this it will naturally lead to a better workflow across an organization.
Re-focus on people
Undeniably, organizational functions that aren’t integrated will struggle to collaborate and communicate effectively. When employees have data at their fingertips, they are more likely to engage with it and analyze it with effect.
Not only can teams understand their teams’ impact better but they can also access and share these materials more easily. This is naturally going to help you put your people first, and trust that they will make better decisions themselves as they are more informed.
How Unit4 can help integrate your data
Integrated data is becoming key for those businesses that want to gain better insight into their data and forecast for the future, gaining an ability to navigate hard times with strategic input from finance teams.
Unit4’s suite of Cloud-based solutions integrates the data of multiple business functions such as finance, HR, procurement, and more. If you want to read more about our FP&A product, or any of our ERP solutions, check out our blogs or book a demo with Unit4 to learn how we can help, today.
