When you look at ERP solutions, it pays to ask questions. You want to ensure that you make the right decision and find a solution that works for your business not only today, but in the future. For many businesses, the best place to start looking is the financial management module, the core of your ERP and likely the most frequently used part of it. As you look to check all the boxes, we would today like to provide you with three questions to ask, as well as three follow-up questions you may not have thought of.
Does it Integrate?
Financial management is a key part of any ERP. Considered to be the backbone of such a solution, the platform provides control over everything—general ledger, accounts payable and receivable, cash management, tax management, and so much more.
Financial management software provides businesses with a full suite of accounting functions to track daily financial operations and generate quarterly and annual financial statements. In addition, it provides tools for reporting, analysis, budgeting, and planning.
Knowing how important the solution is to your long-term success, it isn’t the only thing you need. A financial management solution needs to integrate with a wide variety of other applications and modules to give your people a complete picture of the business.
That said, just because a solution can integrate doesn’t mean it can be integrated easily. Every solution can be integrated—for a price. The question is whether or not you can integrate it easily (and affordably).
Follow-Up: Does it Integrate Easily?
If you look hard enough, you can find someone to code an integration. However, modern ERP vendors understand that businesses are different and work to make integration easy. Through common Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and a network of partners dedicated to improving the software, you can build a truly integrated system of applications that work together without exposing you to exorbitant fees.
This is one of the benefits of the postmodern ERP approach to development, a mixture of the best-in-breed approach to business management applications and the modern suite-based approach to ERP. The push towards postmodern ERP has made it possible for businesses to affordably invest in highly specialized, and sometimes industry-specific, applications that flexibly integrate.
Can I Get Anytime, Anywhere Access?
As your company expands, you begin to realize that your financial professionals aren’t all working together in a central location. Today’s cloud applications are designed to provide easy access to the application, giving executives and end users alike the ability to make decisions whether they are at their office, an airport, or on the beach.
With easy-use mobile apps and accessibility from a browser, today’s financial professionals are finding that cloud applications provide them the anytime, anywhere access they need—no matter what device they use.
With cloud financial management, you can include more employees, suppliers and service providers, business partners, and customers to collaborate and participate in ALL business processes across the globe.
Follow-up: Can I Get Anytime, Anywhere Access Securely?
In addition to providing anytime, anywhere access, a financial management software vendor needs to ensure that only the right people are seeing the information. To make this happen, you need to be able to control who has access to what applications, where people can access data, and how they can access it.
With modern, True Cloud Solutions like Acumatica, you get advanced system security, enhanced control over which users can access which modules, and can prevent unauthorized logins with multifactor authentication.
Our Business is Expanding. How Easily Can I Add Users?
Growing businesses need to add more users relatively frequently. Whether they are new hires, suppliers, or executives, your ability to add users should be simple. One of the key selling points for the cloud, the subscription model removes the up-front licensing fees and replaces it with an ongoing subscription fee.
This means that instead of guessing how many licenses you my need in the future, you can simply make a call, add a user, and your monthly fee is adjusted. However, depending on the vendor you choose, your pricing could quickly get out of control.
Follow-Up: Can I Add Users Affordably?
For companies like yours, you likely have a mix of power users and casual users; people who spend every day in the application, and people who log in once a month to check a report. While the cloud has made it easier than ever to add a new user to the application by simply contacting the vendor or partner, too many vendors also rely on an excessively vendor-friendly “per-user” pricing model.
Unfortunately, this model does not deliver the freedom and flexibility your business needs. By treating power users and casual users equally, prices quickly start to stack up. However, there is an alternative: Resource-based pricing. This pricing model is designed to encourage more widespread participation and use of the system for greater benefit, charging companies on the consumption, rather than the number of users. Therefore, you can add all of the casual users you need to add without driving up the price.
Crestwood Knows Acumatica—Get to Know Crestwood
As one of the leading value-added resellers in the nation, as well as one of the leading Acumatica VARs in the world, we can help you implement and operate this leading ERP solution that can answer “yes” to each of the questions above—as well as the follow-up questions. Offering easy integration, leading security, and customer-friendly pricing, this solution can deliver the financial management solution you need at the price you can afford.
Get to know more about our work with Acumatica and contact us for a free consultation.
