You Upgraded Your Accounting Software: Now What?
Have you implemented a new software solution recently, but aren’t utilizing it to its maximum potential?
Is your accounting staff still reliant on other software for report generation and financial analysis?
Do you feel like you have one foot in the old system and the other foot in your new system?
Technology is one of the most significant investments a company makes and yet it is also the source of equally significant frustration when it doesn’t meet your expectations.
Making It Yours
After you’ve invested in a new software solution and spent hours entering data, completing training courses, and getting employees to buy in to utilizing the new tools, it’s easy to sit back and think, “We made it! We’re done!” But often upon completion of an implementation, you find yourself using a generic configuration that’s not meeting all the needs of your company. Now is the time to customize your software solution and make your accounting processes and project reporting efficient for your team.
If you’ve implemented an ERP solution, but haven’t done much work beyond the basic data setup, there’s a good chance you’re missing out on easy opportunities to:
- Decrease the amount of time it takes to close the books on a monthly basis
- Identify outstanding tasks, both administrative and project-related
- Judge your company performance against industry standards and other key performance indicators
- Eliminate the use of additional software
- Customize your financial statements or other reporting tools
These are all high-impact areas that can affect the overall success and profitability of your organization. Ensuring they are functioning and customized to your organization and the goals you want to reach can not only provide you with a competitive advantage but also make your job much easier.
Setting Goals
Think back to before you invested in your new software. What were your goals for the implementation? Think about the reasons you upgraded your software solution. It’s time to reassess, regroup, and refresh your goals.
- Did you want to get more of your company’s data into one system? Are you still reliant on an old software? What will it take to cut the cord on the old system and fully utilize the new software?
- Were you aiming to improve the accuracy of your financial reporting? Are you able to generate your financials in real-time with your new software? Do you find yourself needing to export data and manually manipulate it to fit your reporting needs?
- Was your investment aimed at improving your project reporting? Have you experienced an improvement into the visibility of your project profitability or are there still some tools you wish you had?
If you didn’t have defined goals for your new software solution originally, it’s never too late to set them! By defining and documenting what you hope to achieve with your accounting tools and assessing how your processes currently function, it will be much easier to find a path to success.
Once you define your goals, it’s time to assign team members to work toward those goals and pick a target completion date. Don’t forget: team members can be internal and external. Consider making a post-implementation punch list to track tasks, who’s assigned to them, and due dates or other checkpoints. It may be helpful to have a weekly status meeting or send out a weekly status email to review your team’s progress toward the goals you’ve defined. Treating your post-implementation customizations as a project will help to keep your goals in the forefront of the team’s mind.
Next Steps
If you are interested in learning how to improve your accounting process or maximizing the advantages of new financial management technology you may have purchased recently, then I’d like to invite you to join me for our upcoming webinar, “Accounting Processes: Working For You or Against You?”. It’s designed to help you learn how to evaluate your processes today and find opportunities to leverage the new financial management tools available on the market.
