Is your current finance solution dated and not up to scratch anymore? Is it failing to give you the functionality that your business requires? Is too expensive and not easily scalable with your business growth? Sound familiar?
Then maybe it is time to consider a cloud-based solution which is more than likely cheaper than your current on-premise solution.
To help you with your decision making, in this blog article, we are going to take you through a number of different instances that showcase how your business can benefit on a day to day basis from implementing Dynamics 365 Business Central, Microsoft’s all in one cloud based financial management solution for SMEs.
Greater visibility over all your business critical information for valuable insights & reporting
Most departments/functions across businesses work with different sets of data with no easily identifiable day to day connection between them. An example of this could be where the sales team aren’t able to see financial information to establish whether or not an invoice has been raised for a particular client.
This problem is resolved with an all-in-one solution where all your data sits in one place allowing easy access to business-critical data as and when you need it to make crucial business decisions. This allows all employees to have the capability to make better decisions when data is easily shared and accessed. Furthermore, by making more informed decisions will help your business to build up a competitive advantage as you will be able to quickly identify changes in your customer needs.
By using a cloud-based ERP solution such as Dynamics 365 Business Central will help to collate your finance, supply chain, workflow, purchasing as well as your inventory in one central location so you can provide a greater level of data and insight to your whole business. Being able to readily share information across a business is pivotal in not only improving the collaboration in teams but also in helping them to achieve business goals.
Improve purchasing processes & approvals
When using a paper-based system, it can be very difficult to keep on top of purchase ordering. This is even more likely to be the case where there are different departmental systems which increases the chances of losing data or inaccuracies.
In the past, supply chain finance has been managed in its own system which might not have been easily connected to another back-office finance solution. Now this has become a thing of the past as its included in the functionality of Dynamics 365 Business Central, an all-in-one business management solution. You will find that workflows for approvals are a feature that is included out-of-the-box so can be used straight away.
Another great thing of having Dynamics 365 Business Central is the fact that it can help give you reassurance when it comes to governance with an extremely tight approvals process which will help to keep you in line with audit requirements. Also, in Business Central you can easily setup workflows to allow employees to only use approved channels and suppliers particularly when it comes to stock & inventory management.
This will help streamline your supply chain to improve your efficiency through automating processes for sales orders, purchase orders & much more. From here, you can easily anticipate demand, plan out cashflow & place orders quickly and efficiently to allow your business to easily meet the demands placed on it by the customers. This will also give you a bird's eye view of all planned and approved transactions.
Quickly identify opportunities & actions based on accurate data
Having critical business data at your fingertips in one system, makes it simple to produce reports for financial close, management information & balance sheets. This way you don’t have to waste your time importing data or integrating with any other systems. This in turn will give your reporting a greater accuracy.
Furthermore, this can help improve the productive in your team as they won’t need to export data from multiple systems to analyse in spreadsheets. This will be automatically completed in Business Central which can provide you with the option to show reports in Excel.
Another extremely useful capability with Dynamics 365 Business Central is that fact that it can be used along with Power BI (Microsoft’s go to business intelligence solution) to create KPIS, dashboards and metrics using real time data. Also, through the use of its intuitive dashboard, you can make key data look game changing by flagging priorities & trends.
Having all these data sources interlinked can allow you to produce standard reports to gain more comprehensive business insights into your business. Better still, you can also easily share these findings with your colleagues or set permissions to say who can view this data.
Greater flexibility & ability to work anywhere
In the modern workplace, flexible working is a core requirement for most businesses with Business Central this doesn’t change. This solution allows your staff to work either in the office or at home with this form of cloud technology helping to improve productivity, freeing people from working in just one place & saving infrastructure costs.
With Business Central, you can access the complete version of the cloud solution anywhere you need from any devices including your mobile, a tablet or at your desk. Furthermore, Dynamics 365 Business Central also gives you the full security of the Microsoft Cloud’s data centres which helps to keep all your sensitive business data secured.
Without the Cloud, you can setup remote working or through other applications manually, however this requires a more expensive infrastructure to be in place and regular maintenance. The problem with this is the fact that only some systems and data may be accessible with workers having to manually download information onto their devices which in itself could compromise data security.
Next Steps?
If you are a small business looking to take advantage of both the cost and functional benefits of a cloud based finance solution like Dynamics 365 Business Central then please get in touch with our Business Central experts to help work towards transforming the way you work.
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