Not everyone likes winter. Some people dislike the cold, short days. However, if you’re on a finance team, you may have another reason for dreading winter: the year-end close. Often, the year-end close can be the most stressful project all year for finance teams. Vast quantities of data must be meticulously combed through, recorded, organized, and stored. A mistake could lead to lost revenue and mean problems in an audit down the road.
While the year-end close will always be stressful, you can significantly lighten the load on your finance team if you have the right tools. An ERP with financial management capabilities can save your team dozens of hours of work while maintaining data integrity and accuracy. Read on to find out three ways an ERP can help you achieve a successful year-end close.
Instant Data Collection
The first way that an ERP can help you during your year-end close actually has to do with something an ERP does year-round: collect accurate data. If you have a cloud-based ERP, your system can track nearly any data you ask it to track across your entire business in real time. Instead of frantically digging through old emails, files, or different software systems to find the data you need, you can find it all right there at your fingertips.
With an ERP, you can have confidence in the data that you’re collecting for your year-end close. You’ll only need to do the minimum of verifying and double-checking data, and you won’t need to try to extract compatible data from information silos, various software systems, or uncommunicative departments.
Automated Workflows
As you prepare your closing schedule, an ERP can save you and your employees hours of time by automating as many workflows as possible. With an ERP, you can streamline managing inventory, creating balance sheets, distributing invoices, and more. In addition, if your ERP includes document management capabilities, your team can collaborate on one authoritative version of a document without constantly emailing it back and forth.
Easy Reporting
A year-end close requires your team to generate countless reports. With an ERP, you can easily harness the power of business intelligence to produce accurate, visually appealing, and easy-to-read reports of nearly any data in your company. Instead of spending hours tweaking each report in Excel, you can easily adjust reports to your liking within your ERP.
Looking for an ERP to Help with Financial Management?
If you’re looking for an ERP that can help with your financial management and year-end close processes, check out Epicor. In addition to fundamental ERP features, Epicor has a wide variety of financial management modules and tools to help your team succeed. With Epicor, you can create live financial dashboards, deliver interactive financial reports, maintain compliance with automated tools, and more. You can also integrate payroll, asset management, multi-site, and multi-currency options as needed.
The experts at Laminin can help you implement, integrate, and customize Epicor to work best for your business. If you’re ready to learn more, contact us today.
Epicor Reminder and Epicor Enterprise 1099 Update
If you’ve already implemented Epicor as your ERP, here are two quick announcements:
As you prepare for year-end close, don’t forget to create a new fiscal year in your Epicor system. This will keep your data organized and ready for the year ahead.
In addition, Epicor 1099 Service Packs have been released. We can help you implement the service pack or develop a workaround if you are not on a supported Epicor Enterprise version. Contact us for help.
