ERP Software and Financial Management Best Practices: 5 Keys to Growth

Your ERP Software will Only Work as Good as Your Financial Management Practices

Dynamic, fast-growing organizations must develop financial management solutions that can quickly adapt to their changing business needs while helping them reduce costs, make smarter decisions, and continuously innovate. Financial success for a business consists of maintaining a strong cash position, building a healthy balance sheet and sustaining profits. However, these things just don't happen. They come as a result of practicing financial discipline.

Making the best use of your finances should be a key element in business planning and assessing new opportunities. With limited resources, you may need to pass up promising opportunities if pursuing them would mean starving your core business of essential funding. In today's market, it's tough to turn a profit even when you do things right. Here are five keys to stay ahead of financial challenge:

1.  Monitoring Key Financial Management Ratios

In and of themselves the raw numbers on your balance sheet, income statement and cash flow have limited value. Of far more value are ratios that can be extracted from these documents. The secret to effective financial management lies in knowing which ratios to track and what they tell you about the state of your business.

2. Other Key Indicators to Monitor

While it is critically important to monitor a core set of financial key indicators, there are a number of "non-financial" indicators that can have a significant impact on your company's financial performance: customers, market, and sales.

3. Managing Cash Flow

We've all heard the saying "cash is king" and for small and medium size businesses who are growing, this is definitely case. Cash flow is of vital importance to the health of a business.

4. Forecasting

A small to medium size business must constantly adjust to a changing market. In order to do so, it needs to take a forward-looking approach when it comes to allocating financial resources. Relying on data that only shows past performance only gives you half the story.

While forecasting is not rocket science, it wil take you some time to get your predictions right. What is important is to get your figure as accurate as possible. When you are working on your forecast you will need to have the right information at hand.

5. The Right Tools

ERP financial management software can replace slow and cumbersome manual processes and integrate with familiar applications such as Excel. This leads to faster access to critical information and drives efficient operations, intuitive businses decisions, and potential for profitable growth.

While there are many challenges businesses must overcome as they grow, maximizing their financial assets is at the top of the list. Download our whitepaper, Five Keys to Successful Financial Management for Growing Businesses, to learn how to keep on top of your financials by applying some disciplind practices to your existing processes.

If you have questions about this blog or other questions about increasing your company's profitability, contact us or call 888.725.2555 and our ERP experts and we look forward to finding ways to help you.

SBS Group USA:  From local offices across North America, SBS Group provides business management solutions to help growing companies meet their operational, financial, regulatory, and technical challenges. Through a proven process of Discovery, Analysis, Design and Delivery, we leverage ERP, CRM, Business Intelligence, and Office Productivity technology to build, deploy, and support innovative systems in your data center or in the Cloud.

With your business at its core, the SBS experience begins with an assessment of “what is” by our industry experts.  We’ll mutually develop an individualized roadmap that includes crisp deliverables, transparent budgets and evaluate how to make all of your technology work better together.

The SBS Difference​

• Single source provider of technology solutions
• Custom development, project management, and application consulting teams
• Reduced risk with PMI (Project Management Institute) certified project managers
• Exceptional business expertise across an array of focus industries and verticals
• Portal for collaboration, document management, and project deliverables
• Dedicated account manager to oversee and manage our business relationship
• Microsoft Gold Competencies in Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relationship Management 
• Top Microsoft Partner – 2014 President’s Club, 2014 Inner Circle Member
• Over 3000 loyal clients
• Completed more than 1,000,000 hours of implementations
• More than 5000 hours of training spent annually
• Deep Microsoft Dynamics expertise with more than 200 MS Dynamics certified consultants