As the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States begins to wind down, there’s a lot of talk about returning to normal. Folks are out discussing social plans, family gatherings, and checking out neighborhood spots just like they used to do. What has changed though, and likely won’t be returning to “normal,” is every tech business and IT department. With the boom in remote work, we’ve seen rapid adoption of technical solutions to old-school work problems, but a lot of those solutions aren’t ready for what is coming down the road.
The folks at Oracle NetSuite recently released a free, thorough white paper on the sorts of problems that are approaching IT-dependent organizations. New strategies with cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) are being developed, and keeping up with the latest studies on cloud computing will let your business thrive.
Sudden Changes in Proximity, and Priorities
We all remember the sudden shift to working from home in the spring of 2020. Suddenly parents had to handle children being home from school, young employees realized their 600 square-foot apartment in the city center wasn’t going to cut it, and business owners were trying to juggle keeping everyone safe and their business afloat.
Bringing your staff together virtually is already difficult, now add the mixing of personal and work hours, or major changes like a move, and you have a recipe for disaster. Closing the books is just one area where working remotely proved difficult, with traditional methods like Quickbooks suddenly breaking down because not everyone is on the same page.
Cloud ERP, though, allows your staff to manage the process of closing the books without requiring them to be together. The checklist functionality lets everyone see where the process is, who has responsibility, and when that is completed, all from their own home on their own time. Employees will have access to critical data wherever they are located and can easily collaborate with their colleagues by looking at the same data in real-time.
Complex Accounting Regulations
Anyone with an interest in international trade and business knows how tumultuous the past five years have been. Brexit, NAFTA 2.0, the never-ending trade talks with China, EU digital tax, all have contributed to a sense that the international rules for business can change on a dime. That’s just internationally, we haven’t even spoken about updates to SEC and CFPB regulations, or the government looking to regulate cryptocurrency exchanges and overinflated valuations, or more mundane changes like the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP).
Traditional ERP and spreadsheets make it difficult and costly to re-engineer financial calculations. How long would it take for your accounting team to put leases lasting longer than 12 months on your books, as new GAAP rules require? Managing this process manually requires not only time, but also runs the risk of compromising data integrity or not being able to produce accurate revenue stream projections that factor in new rules.
Cloud ERPs receive regular updates to ensure ever-changing accounting and regulatory requirements are met and do not require the cumbersome re-engineering on-site software can require to meet these changes. You won’t have to double and triple check every facet of your accounting system to make sure everything is in the proper place, saving you time, money, and a whole lot of headaches.
Siloed Departments
Any large business knows what a headache it can be for teams, all in the same company with ostensibly the same goals, to butt heads over whose data is more accurate. When leadership gets conflicting reports, it can send the business into a tailspin as everyone fights over who is right.
With traditional ERP, it’s common for business departments to each have their own IT fiefdom, either unwilling or unable to communicate with the rest of the company. When each team is siloed away from the others, and there isn’t a common set of facts to deal with, it can drain revenue, morale, and clients from any business.
On the other hand, cloud ERPs have data from lower and middle management sent up, and it all gets compiled. With a cloud solution, not only can the workforce be remote, but all departments will be able to see one, unified picture of how the business is performing for real-time collaboration and decision making. With everyone seeing the same metrics and objectives, it smooths out the wrinkles that leadership needs to deal with when it comes time to decide.
Creating a better business with Cloud ERP
According to NetSuite’s white paper, Cloud ERP has several benefits for any business that is dealing with the upheaval caused by outside events. The ones previewed here are just a few of the business functions that Oracle studied, and they’ve made this content completely free. You can download a PDF of the white paper here.