THE NIGHTMAREON .XLS STREET

Bulletin: There’s a disfigured midnight mangler on the loose looking to haunt your dreams, slash your productivity, and sabotage your business. This well-known destructor is only getting freakishly bigger and more cumbersome by the day - known for crushing company visibility, plaguing organizations with inaccurate data and sending finance teams into mind-numbing rekeying data rage. It must be stopped before it’s too late!! This nightmare maker we are talking about is none other than “the spreadsheet.”

Okay - those spreadsheets - when used for simple functions and projects might not be quite that scary. But unfortunately, many businesses have become reliant on them to run major parts of their business and it just doesn’t work. They are error prone, time-sucking, hard to manage and even harder to generate reports from - all things that actually are frightening for your business, not to mention your audit processes.

For the accounting function, it’s not just the lack of security and traceability that can occur when your key financial data lies outside your core accounting system. Having a manual and opaque accounting process makes it brutally painful to close the books at the end of the month, maintain accurate, reliable information and make a business decision without fear of the outcome. Do you have the information at hand to keep balance sheets in check, answer customer questions, compile data quickly and easily? Probably not. In short, an over-reliance on spreadsheets is more than just a bad dream– it’s actually creating nightmares company-wide for your business.

4 WAYS SPREADSHEETS WILL HAUNT YOUR DREAMS, YOUR DATA AND YOUR BUSINESS

Is there a Nightmare on .XLS Street in your company? Read the following signs to find out:

Cash flow is the lifeblood of any growing company, and yet so many organizations allow their billing process to languish in a tangle of monstrous spreadsheets and manual processes. This increases the frequency of delays and errors, and generally creates a sluggish opportunity-to-cash cycle. Any time you rely on people to manually re-key data and enter calculations into a spreadsheet, you’re going to experience data inaccuracies, formula errors and duplications – all of which need to be fixed before you can actually bill the client. Not to mention the amount of time it takes for employees to manage and execute such a cumbersome process. Your company is literally paying for its spreadsheet addiction in lost time and wasted man-hours. Switching to a cloud-based accounting solution and cutting back on the spreadsheets where they fall short not only makes accounting and subsequent processes more enjoyable, but it also makes your company

more efficient, which helps it get paid faster. And since accounting solutions have inherent rules and formulas, errors are less likely to occur. According to a recent study by Nucleus Research, companies that upgrade to a cloud-based accounting system can accelerate the billing process and reduce account receivable days outstanding by up to 50% - simply by drastically reducing delays and errors.

YOU’RE NOT GETTINGPAID FAST ENOUGH

#1

Many companies rely on a strong compliance operation in order to ensure they’re abiding by certain rules and guidelines when it comes to their financial reporting (or else the boogeyman will come after them!) But if data lives in multiple places, the result is a torturous, costly and time-consuming audit process. Finance has to scramble to pull together information, while spreadsheet accounting increases the chances that there will be errors – which won’t score you any points with auditors. In short, time, effort and audit fees run through the roof. Easier audits are just another advantage to moving your financial data to a shared, secure cloud environment. All of your financial data and supporting evidence is accessible from a single point. Common approval processes can be applied across different locations and business units, which makes auditing a much more efficient process. And your data is secure.

YOU’RE BLEEDING TIME AND MONEY DURING THE COMPLIANCE PROCESS

#2

When your business uses both an accounting solution and spreadsheets to generate financial statements, it’s impossible for your data to work for you. With multiple systems offering multiple versions of data, the finance team has to hustle about to reconcile all of the information and ensure its accuracy. It’s a miracle if they can even get the bill out in a timely manner, let alone play an active role in planning, strategy and data analysis. When information is stuck in spreadsheet silos, it can’t be instructive to anyone, least of all a harried finance team that’s just trying to keep up with its clunky billing process. Real-time financial analysis and modeling is pretty much impossible, while a one-dimensional view of data means that reporting would be incomplete anyhow. A cloud-based accounting system brings data into the light – where it can actually be of use to your company. Individuals can easily pull reports by region, product, cost center

and more. Both Aberdeen Group and Forrester have indicated in various research, that this kind of transparency and ease of analysis translates to better decision-making, by increasing real-time reporting and improving time-to-decisions.

YOUR DATA IS IN THE DARK#3

Strong businesses understand that a happy customer means repeat business and referrals, which means you need to do everything you can to put your customer first. The connection between accounting and customer service may not seem readily apparent, but the two are surprisingly intertwined. When finance and sales can’t share information and collaborate, the customer suffers. Order processing takes longer than it should, and it’s difficult to respond quickly and accurately to customer requests. Forrester Research recently published data indicating that companies who use an integrated, cloud-based accounting and CRM system actually have happier customers – up to 91% happier. And according to research from Aberdeen, companies who use an integrated, cloud-based accounting and CRM system see a marked increase in referenceable customers, helping them win more deals.

YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE REACHING FOR MORE, BUT ARE GETTING THE SHORT END OF THE STICK

#4

The health of your company suffers when you rely too heavily on spreadsheets for your finance function. If any of the above signs feel familiar, you may be living the nightmare on .XLS street. Don’t let this scary mess pull you deeper and deeper into a dark hole of frustrations and inefficiencies.

If you’re looking to streamline your accounting processes and avoid a spreadsheet nightmare, look no further than cloud accounting built on the #1 cloud platform in the world - the Salesforce App Cloud. Finance spends significantly less time on repetitive tasks (one study from Aberdeen Group even showed a reduction from 200 hours per month to 4 hours per month), increasing productivity by up to 98%. Meanwhile billing and receivables are accelerated, and management gets the information they need, when they need it, so they can make the important decisions that will move the company forward.

CONCLUSION

To learn more, call 1-866-743-2220or visit us at http://www.financialforce.com

ABOUT FINANCIALFORCE.COM FinancialForce.com delivers ERP at Customer Speed®. Built on the Salesforce App Cloud, FinancialForce ERP equips customer-centric businesses with a unified cloud platform and all the applications necessary to grow both the top and bottom line. Our Financial Management, Human Capital Management (HCM), Professional Services Automation (PSA), and Supply Chain Management (SCM) apps allow businesses to increase the speed in which they operate and be more responsive along every touch point of a customer’s journey. Founded in 2009 and headquartered in San Francisco, FinancialForce.com is backed by Salesforce, Technology Crossover Ventures, UNIT4 and Advent International.

For more information about FinancialForce:www.financialforce.cominfo@financialforce.com Americas: 1-866-743-2220 UK: 0808 2389791 Int’l: +44 1423 532832 APAC: +61 2 9006 1351

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