How to Modernize Your Finance Tech Stack: A 3-Part Game Plan

The expectations of Finance have changed, and a new wave of modern accounting and finance apps have arrived on the scene in response. But there is a widening gap between these heightened expectations and the aging, piecemeal finance technology stack that F&A teams are often stuck using.

Revitalizing accounting and finance technology can seem intimidating, from migrating to prioritizing and sequencing. Any technology upgrade requires a plan that identifies the issues, the applications to address them, where to start, and where you need to be based on your organization’s overall strategy.

This becomes much more manageable when broken down into achievable steps. By focusing on freeing up the most number of resources first, you can then prioritize protecting the organization from reporting and regulatory risk.

Here is a three-part game plan for modernizing your finance technology stack. It is designed with the future state in mind and provides a roadmap that minimizes risk while ensuring each step of the journey builds on the next.

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The ripest opportunity within finance organizations is typically found within the financial close—and automation can reduce manual effort for some close tasks by as much as 50%. This is one of the reasons Gartner predicts that around 40% of enterprise finance organizations will focus on enhancing their close processes.

Finance automation will lock down reconciliations, intercompany processes, and controls, and enable accounting resources to address a typically spreadsheet-driven process without the worry of upgrading an existing application. An ERP-agnostic solution enables teams to augment their existing ERP investment, and effectively protects the close from a shifting underlying ERP landscape.

Automation helps organizations move to modern accounting by unifying their data and processes, automating repetitive work, and driving accountability through visibility.

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With skilled resources freed up and accounting risk mitigated through automation, accounting and finance organizations can move to step two—driving strategy through planning and analytics.

Automation unleashes accountants to do what drew them into this profession in the first place: investigate exceptions and anomalies instead of spending their whole day trying to find them, and provide real-time reporting that is relevant for today’s decisions.

Effective planning and analysis are dependent on timely and quality data, primarily actuals, which must be addressed through close rigor and automation. It’s also essential to approach this in an integrated way, tying strategy back to the financial plan to ensure alignment and collaboration between teams.

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To abstract the organization from any disruption from an ERP upgrade, a cloud-based solution is the last step on the road to a finance stack upgrade.

Addressing the close and planning and analysis processes can be achieved regardless of the ERP, and they are mutually complementary. These are the least disruptive upgrades, typically replacing spreadsheets and delivering relatively fast time to value.

Moving the ERP to the cloud is especially essential for mid-size organizations. It enables resource-constrained teams to gain automatic updates and reduce the need to supplement it with spreadsheets amidst accounting, regulatory, and operating environment change.

Finance automation is the key to setting up midsize companies to scale and ensuring that effective processes are in place before teams fall into bad habits that expose the organization to risk.

Accounting and finance technology offers powerful benefits that, with the widespread adoption of the cloud, are more achievable than ever before.

The challenge is not implementing discrete systems. It’s implementing applications in a post-modern landscape, integrating and sequencing the upgrades to ensure all the parts fit together and add value to each other.

And increasingly, the value is not just in the applications. It’s how they work together, and the integration points between them.

With finance leaders making more of the technology decisions, creating a blueprint and executing a plan for revitalizing the finance application stack has never been more important.

Read the Finance Technology Game Plan for a practical roadmap that will help you get started on your organization’s game plan.