5 reasons for integrating your ERP financial data with FP&A

Similarly, the main benefit of enterprise resources management (ERP) is that it unites your financial, planning, operational, people, processes, and data, along with a suite of other business functions, so that you can manage them optimally.

In this blog, we are going to discuss why the integration of financial data through FP&A and ERP with other key organizational functions, and the collaboration it allows, can bring a large amount of value to an organization.

Why integrate your ERP and Financial data?

Integrated data is vital not just for data-led thinking and accurate visibility but to benefit from a whole host of features that define operational and collaborative excellence. Here are 5 reasons your organization should take an integrated approach to data.

Advanced reporting capabilities

When financial reports need to be generated, teams need accurate and trusted data to form actions and insights. In other words, the data siloes created by legacy systems can lead to inaccurate budgeting or forecasting reports. With integrated data, you can create a report that takes everything into account, without great effort.

Two organizational functions, such as finance and HR, can communicate and pass information to each other that is up-to-date, and reports can then be accurate and represent the reported situation as realistically as possible.

Better decision making

With clearer reports, and integrated data, C-suite executives and managers alike can make better decisions with confidence and a single source of truth. It’s much easier to know what they are looking at represents a whole, rather than only a fraction of what’s occurring. So, when decisions need to be made, they can be made confidently with accurate data that is trusted and easier to get a granular drill-through view of underlying source data in just a couple of clicks.

Importantly, the decision maker can get a better understanding of the consequences of their decision before they make it. When managers and employees are well informed about their organizational data, they can both collaborate and work more effectively together, leading to more informed decisions from both parties.

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Inform strategy

In the modern business world, the office of the CFO and their FP&A teams are expected to inform strategy and be major players in the C-suite rather than just offering financial management. To provide strategic insight, financial teams need to regain control of their data to effectively forecast more robustly.

You can’t look to the future without a pre-existing and accurate understanding of your entire business. To be able to forecast accurately, you need to understand all your data and how each individual function affects the organization as a whole.

With integrated data, data consolidation times will be reduced allowing for teams to focus on tasks like forecasting which is much easier with full visibility of data. Legacy systems that rely on siloed data will struggle with forecasting when it’s harder to process and analyze fragmented data.

Improved productivity

When data is integrated across departments it makes it easier for teams to utilize and re-purpose the data itself, improving efficiency across the board.

When your employees can easily create accurate reports with the push of a button, without the endless over-reliance on Excel spreadsheets, this allows them to spend their time on other key skills like analysis, forecasting, and crafting storytelling skills with real insight.

Integrated financial data like this can help your organization move from simply managing data and making it work to an organization that can analyze its data and use it to look forward to the future. When data is optimized like this it will naturally lead to a better workflow across an organization.