BLOG

When we think of cyberattacks, we usually think of bank accounts being raided and passwords stolen. But according to the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), older enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are a top target of tech criminals. ERP security is crucial because these systems are at the core of what an organisation does. They integrate data and processes from across the enterprise, ensuring streamlined and automated operations. However, as a single repository of all the information that keeps the system functioning, if breached they can also provide a gateway to the most sensitive and valuable information an [...]

The highly integrated digital world of today’s businesses is more dynamic than ever. Consequently, executives need to make decisions more quickly than in the past. However, business decisions are often difficult to make; thus, executives often delay making decisions well beyond when action is necessary. Or they make decisions quickly because action is necessary, but the decisions may not be good because there was not enough time to build consensus and alignment. This phenomenon can be particularly acute in a recession. Why are decisions hard to make under pressure? Accurate, real-time data are providing powerful insights for finance leaders. To [...]

The days of monthly reports based on manual spreadsheets that must be created fresh every few weeks and updated manually are long gone. Today’s collaborative, automated, connected systems outperform their precursors. Today, machine learning is driving advancements in financial reporting systems at warp speed. Books are being closed faster than ever, while Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems with AI capabilities can spot inefficiencies in different production stages, or if factory machinery is about to overheat, or even which employees are overworked, unhappy and likely to quit. And there are some game-changing developments on the horizon. It can be a challenge [...]

SystemsAccountants recently hosted “Women In NetSuite” in Chicago, Illinois, home to our USA headquarters. This engaging and inspiring networking event successfully brought together over forty NetSuite professionals from the Chicago metro area and five surrounding states to share industry insights and discuss the triumphs and challenges faced by women in the NetSuite ecosystem today. In the spirit of sharing stories and illuminating common ground, the focal point of the event was an intriguing Q&A with Director of NetSuite Recruitment Isabella Romanazzi and NetSuite Professional Elise Telechan. We’ve gathered and summarized three key takeaways from their dialogue on “How NetSuite Changes [...]

Brief: CFOs today must juggle a growing list of responsibilities at their firms, including increasingly taking charge of technology or IT-related spending, a study released by the Controllers Council and SaaS firm Trintech found. Most CFOs and controllers — 92% — report managing their companies’ finance and accounting (F&A) technology, according to the study, with nearly 70% of survey respondents stating they are at least participating in their firms’ F&A digital transformation initiatives. Fourteen per cent of finance leaders, for that matter, report they are overseeing all corporate digital transformation at their organisations. Insight: CFOs and controllers are beginning to [...]

Corporate finance departments are constantly under pressure to help deliver growth while becoming more efficient. Doing more with less is a challenge, and the digital transformation of finance departments is often touted as the solution. However, Gartner estimates at least 70% of finance transformation projects fail. To avoid failures and false starts, it’s crucial that businesses are mindful when they embark on finance transformation, and know what success requires. New digital systems are often valuable tools, but alone they cannot have the desired impact. There are other factors that are all necessary if insufficient conditions. Instead, finance transformation should be [...]

The past few years have shown us that trying to avoid all risk is an unrealistic business strategy. Companies were hit with a perfect storm when the COVID-19 pandemic led to supply chain disruptions, worldwide inflation, and a volatile talent market. The businesses that came out on top engaged in what MIT’s Donald Sull has called “agile absorption.” They were risk-resilient, seizing the opportunities that arose while simultaneously cutting costs and taking other measures to withstand the turbulence. With these lessons in mind, it’s time to reframe enterprise risk management (ERM). As the traditional seat of risk management, finance teams [...]

An ERP system consolidates data from across the organisation’s functions and departments, linking them to a single data source. This streamlines processes and provides management with an accurate, timely, and singular point of truth. But because ERP software touches so many different elements of a business’s operations, implementing a new system also presents huge challenges. Risks of implementing an ERP system There are eight major risks associated with implementing an ERP system. These are: Lack of Management Support Insufficient Project Management Overly Optimistic Scheduling Difficulty Finding Experienced ERP Talent Neglecting To Prepare and Train Employees A Poorly Managed Integration Poor [...]

Investors, customers, regulators and a host of other stakeholders including staff are increasingly asking not just how much profit a company generates but, crucially, how it does so. Among the reasons for this is the growth of interest in sustainable and responsible business practices. In answering this question, enterprises have seized upon a sustainable accounting practice called Integrated Reporting, in which they communicate how much value they have created – and indeed destroyed – by measuring six types of capital. The six capitals that are measured in Integrated Reporting are: Financial - investments and other measures of financial performance Manufactured [...]

The value and volume of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have reached their highest levels in recent years: 2021 saw the highest M&A deal value in history, reaching nearly $6 trillion.  However, while M&A activity is ever-present in business today, it is still a fact that between 70% and 90% of all mergers and acquisitions fail. How can CFOs effectively lead their people through and realise the full value of a merger? Due diligence, building the investment case and deal structure are essential facts needed to build a successful M&A, but what role do ‘soft skills’ have in improving the quality, [...]

A word from Isabella Romanazzi Director of NetSuite Recruitment, SystemsAccountants USA In honor of International Women’s Day 2023, I am delighted to have the opportunity to share the story of my career journey as a woman in financial systems recruitment. After University, I was truly lucky that the recruitment industry found me. I joined SystemsAccountants blissfully unaware of how recruitment would become the foundation of and set the wheels in motion for my career at large. With a background in retail and customer service and a degree in Organizational Communication and Public Relations, I quickly found a love for recruitment [...]

High-growth companies are built around modern finance departments with advanced technology, where teams use strategic analysis to power decision-making. Traditional responsibilities like accounting, compliance, payroll, and balance sheets are still central, but more is required. As the insights in How to win backing for your finance transformation make clear, the gold standard of CFO today is a true business partner. They should deliver smart management intelligence, shape board thinking, allocate dynamic resources, and most crucially, drive real growth. Reshaping a finance office to deliver these needs has consequences for an organisation’s strategy, structure, processes and workforce, and understanding what is [...]

The playbook will guide senior leaders in what it takes to gain board buy-in for digital transformation. It will provide the rationale for transformation as well as information on the required technology, teams and process to drive fast digital change and growth. Packed with actionable advice, the guide includes statistics, insights and case studies that CFOs and CIOs can use as supporting evidence in their board proposal.

Download our white paper on how to win backing for your finance tranformation.

SystemsAccountants recently hosted our ‘Women in Finance Systems’ event 2022, an engaging and thought-provoking evening which successfully brought together over forty ERP, EPM and Finance Transformation professionals to discuss the triumphs and challenges being faced by women in the industry today. Our guest speakers were two experienced finance transformation managers, Ruvini Fernando and Abigail Round, who covered a range of topics including cultural narratives, gender expectations, mentoring, the importance of soft skills and having the confidence to be your authentic self. Download our white paper on the five key takeaways from the September event.

How is the role of CFOs changing?
That was a topic of discussion during “The New CFO” panel at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit in Laguna Niguel, California, on Monday. I had the opportunity to talk with finance chiefs at Block, Nordstrom, Workday, The Estée Lauder Companies, and the incoming CFO at Meta about what they’re experiencing.
“I really see the CFO role as being an increasingly strategic one that helps our company balance aspiration and discipline,” said Amrita Ahuja, CFO at Block, a financial services company. Aspirations are the big business opportunities Block wants to address, and discipline is measuring the effectiveness of Block’s investments.

Data represents a store of value and a strategic opportunity for enterprises across all industries. From edge to cloud to core, businesses are producing data in vast quantities, at an unprecedented pace. And they’re now rapidly evolving their data management strategies to efficiently cope with data at scale and seize the advantage. … Or are they?

Well, some are. Those are the data-first organisations, the industry leaders who understand that, amid a flood of data, navigating via data-first principles to radically simplify data management is not only critical to surviving and thriving in the long run, but also essential right now, when advantages in data management can determine a company’s future success.

While companies are increasingly choosing ERP software and finance systems based in the cloud, many are still operating from legacy systems that aren’t connected to the internet and using processes that create accounting silos.

For example, employee expenses and customer sales that run on different systems make it difficult for employers to gain a “live” picture of how the business is performing. Mistakes can also be made as colleagues manually share documents and data with each other.

Whether you’re a start-up or a large corporation, integrating your financial processes has many advantages, from cutting costs to helping you plan for the future. We highlight 5 benefits below.

An enterprise resource planning (ERP) system obtains and structures transactional data, helping to coordinate the company’s resources and producing real-time operational data. It can drive your company’s success and growth by streamlining processes and consolidating data from disparate functions to provide a single, accurate version of the truth. With this information, leadership can more effectively manage operations and optimise decisions.

“ERP systems offer strategic and quantifiable benefits,” says Justin May, Managing Director of Truskey Consulting, which helps organisations leverage technology to maximise efficiencies, cut costs, and drive new revenue opportunities. May says ERP solutions can help companies successfully move into new markets, launching new products and services more efficiently. “The ERP system should help to enable the Business Strategy,” he adds.

Succession planning helps companies retain top talent and enable a smooth handover when a key person leaves.

The process ensures that employees are developed to fill important roles within a business, such as an IT manager or Chief Financial Officer (CFO).

By following succession planning best practices, you’ll have groomed a successor with the expertise and management skills to keep the business humming in the event someone departs.

Succession planning means you can move staff from role to role as needed, and create a culture of professional development. It can also help achieve better strategic workforce planning.

Millions of people are leaving their jobs every month, and there is no sign of this epochal movement slowing anytime soon.

Dubbed ‘the Great Resignation’, the wave of people who have changed roles or otherwise exited the workforce since the pandemic began could result in one fifth of the global workforce quitting their jobs in 2022, the largest study of its kind recently found. Last year, 47.8 million US workers left their jobs at an average of nearly 4 million each month, while in the first half of 2022 that number rose to an average of almost 4.5 million per month.

Digital transformation fundamentally alters how an organisation operates and delivers value. Get it right and the result can drive new levels of success, but any wrong step, particularly regarding data management, can provoke damaging inefficiency, even dysfunction.

“Staff hear about ‘digital transformation’ and wonder what it means for them,” says Julie Downs, Interim Senior IT Director at video game developer Jagex, who has overseen many digital change management projects.

“It can mean different things to everyone, but it really relates to the business as a whole and how all the departments inside a company can share information, solutions, processes and data to continually improve.”

By using data—rather than, say, guesstimates or hunches—to guide decision-making, corporate leaders can drive performance and gain an edge on their competition. However, raw data rarely suffices. Instead, information needs to be assembled, reviewed, and analysed.

That’s where business intelligence software has played a critical role. Companies are now also turning to business analytics, which tends to provide more guidance for the future. In the past, it commonly would have only been the finance and accounting functions using these tools. However, as organisations embrace digital transformation they are increasingly being used to aid decision-making across many departments.

Women in finance are still underrepresented at every level. In the UK, women comprise 40% of the finance workforce, but although 52% of finance’s entry-level workforce are women, “their representation falls off at every step”. In 2015, the UK government launched the HM Treasury Women in Finance Charter with the aim of encouraging the financial services industry “to improve gender balance in senior management.” Despite steady progress in that time, the June 2022 review of the Charter’s progress found the average level of female representation in senior management was 33% in 2021.

Why does this matter?  A 2019 study by S&P found that “firms with female CFOs are more profitable and generated excess profits of $1.8T. Female CEOs saw a 20% increase in stock price momentum and female CFOs saw a 6% increase in profitability and 8% larger stock returns.”

Deciding whether to hire an employee or contractor was once a simple choice: contractors were the go-to hire for shorter sprints and employees were appropriate for longer hauls. But it’s not so simple now.

The world of work has changed significantly over the past two years, with employees now expecting greater flexibility and employers facing fierce competition for talent in sectors like finance and IT – regardless of whether that talent is a contractor or a full-time employee

Remote work job listings are soaring. By February 2022, they accounted for more than half of all employment postings on LinkedIn, a first for the professional network site. In the UK, searches for jobs that allow working from home soared more than 790% over the last two years, prompting a warning there may be more people looking for such roles than there are positions available.

“The key takeaway here is that the supply of, and employees’ demand for, remote jobs have both grown rapidly over the past two years, but demand has grown faster,” said Mary Kate Fields, data communications manager at LinkedIn. Candidates increasingly want the flexibility that comes with remote working arrangements, and more businesses are pivoting to hybrid or digital-only models to save the costs of owning and running office space.

A job for life has been replaced for many with a job for the day.

Lifestyles and career choices have changed rapidly with technological advance and societal evolution creating trends that were rapidly accelerated by the seismic economic shocks of the 2008 financial crash and the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.

The traditional model of joining a company straight from school and leaving it as a pensioner has evaporated. Data from the World Bank shows that 46 per cent of the global workforce were self-employed in 2019, equating to about 1.6bn people.

Organisations are increasingly relying on contingent workers to fill talent gaps and support their business growth. Fuelled partly by the pandemic, the gig economy has seen a huge increase in recent years, as workers look for more flexibility or perform “side hustles” to boost their income.

A contingent workforce can bring plenty of benefits to a company – but it’s also a complex employer responsibility that requires careful management. What is a contingent workforce, and what are the best practices in contingent labour management?

It’s a great time to be searching for finance systems jobs.

Global shocks and technological advances that upend workforces are nothing new, but there have been few periods of volatility as now, which is playing directly into the hands of talented professionals looking for new roles.

Waves of resignations are expected to continue through 2023, and trends that show that the growing demand for finance expertise, accountants, auditors and finance system managers is not being met. The shortage of finance talent has even been dubbed an “existential crisis”.

While Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) are both software systems that potentially play a major role in financial transformation, and allow organisations to put data at the centre of their decision-making, they are in fact quite distinct systems, with few areas of overlap. Employed shrewdly, they perform different, yet complementary functions that together can accelerate an organisation’s performance.

Broadly, ERP obtains and structures transactional data, helping to coordinate the company’s resources, producing real-time operational data. EPM on the other hand provides analysis and a user-friendly interface to help managers gain insights and report on their business.

The digital transformation of business is firmly underway in today’s dynamic global markets, because decision-makers know that getting this right drives sustained success. But transformation is easier said than done, as organisational complexity, outdated systems, and process bottlenecks challenge business leaders trying to convert to digital-first principles.

Overcoming these challenges is where enterprise resource planning – or ERP – comes in. But what does ERP mean?

ERP refers to a digital system that consolidates data from an organisation’s various functions, linking them to a single data source. Across industries and companies of varying sizes, ERP solutions allow leaders to boost process efficiency, optimise the allocation of resources, and make more informed decisions. As a result, ERP systems have become integral to managing functions from resource planning to supply chain management, marketing, and finance.

Corporate finance departments are undergoing rapid change. Data-driven technology is enabling them to streamline their traditional accounting roles while mining new insights that can help them improve and add value to their operations.

The technology at the heart of this finance transformation comprises Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) systems. ERP software sits at the heart of all modern finance systems, structuring transactional data and helping to coordinate the company’s resources, producing real-time operational data. EPM systems, on the other hand, go one step further by providing analysis and a user-friendly interface to help managers gain insights and report on their business.

There’s little sign of the talent crunch in finance slowing. The already-problematic shortage of critical skills is growing, and industry groups are reporting significant struggles to fill gaps across their memberships.

Competition for talent is soaring across all sectors, with 87% of employers saying they’re struggling to fill positions, according to a report from Monster, Flexible Future: UK Hiring Outlook 2022. HR groups have labelled the skills shortage in finance jobs a “ticking time-bomb”.

A major part of the issue is the speed at which digital processes and services are being adopted to meet demand from customers and generate efficiencies internally. Rapid advances in cloud computing and AI are happening in shorter cycles, changing the nature of the finance function and creating intense demand for the skills needed to implement and manage these technologies.

Finance and treasury departments are embracing technology at pace. Data-derived insights are guiding CFO decision-making processes, optimising reporting functions, automating transactions, and making forecasting ever more accurate.

The new technological landscape is giving finance operations a forward-looking perspective on their company’s activities that are enabling them to make better-informed strategic decisions, cut operational costs through efficiencies, and improve standards of service.

From a human resources perspective, digitisation and automation have removed staff from repetitive tasks so they can concentrate on value-creating activities. But they have also made it more necessary for treasury departments to build high-functioning teams possessed of both accountancy and IT skills.

As CFO at SystemsAccountants I wanted to share my story for International Women’s Day 2022 to help #breakthebias.

From my time in High School I was lucky enough to realise what I wanted to do and set my sights on a career in Accountancy.  This started in practice, training under the excellent vocational AAT qualification.  I decided University was not for me and wanted to learn “on the job” and am so glad that I opted for this route as I gained such a strong foundation of knowledge that has helped through my entire career.

I continued my studies and through much hard work and determination, was extremely proud to qualify with ICAEW and continued to work in practice for 13 years.

The Contractor’s CV playbook for winning your next job.

Are you a contractor looking to win your next contract with confidence?

It goes without saying that a well-written and well-presented contracting CV does a lot of the hard work in getting noticed, getting selected and getting hired.

This is especially true when you consider what you’ll likely so often be up against – competing to get noticed from many other applicants, standing out enough to be selected by recruitment teams, and being skilled enough to ultimately be hired by the client.

Presenting yourself as the perfect-fit can be daunting. Thankfully, with our Top 10 Tips, SystemsAccountants are here to give you the low-down on everything you can do to give yourself the very best chance of getting seen, selected and engaged for your next contractor role.

Despite a substantial sales and marketing effort by SAP, new incentives such as RISE, and the intention to discontinue standard support of SAP ECC in 2027, many businesses still seem reluctant to move onto S4/HANA.

For many organizations, the pandemic has highlighted the fragility of their key business processes and their current technology platforms yet they are still struggling to justify the costs and the business disruption of a move to S4/HANA.

In addition, many boards remain skeptical that a move to S4/HANA is a strategic priority and will unlock their digital transformation agenda.

The virtual roundtable webinar, which was hosted by leading independent specialists Neil Lewis and John Carey, addressed these issues and gave the global participants the opportunity to discuss their S4/HANA challenges.

For contract and consulting we engage on a time and materials basis, with per hour cost for our consultancy time, and expenses for time on client site where necessary.

Acceptance, Approval and Authorizations

SA utilizes a web-based time recording application which all of our consultants use to document their time spent on projects. This system allows clients to review where time has been spent, and via an approval & authorization workflow – confirm the work has been delivered to the expected standard. Clients will be invoiced on upon approval of this time. Payment Terms and Invoicing would be at 30 days.

Whilst large companies and manufacturers have long used enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions to manage resources and control budgets; it is only over the past few years that Colleges and Universities have started to embrace enterprise wide business applications.

Higher education may well be one of the final frontiers for ERP applications, and with good reason.

In higher education, as it is with most other verticals, competition is tightening even as budgets are shrinking. ERP provides insights into how these institutions can better allocate budgets to ensure that they are performing in ways that outpace expectations.

As a Finance Leader I am sure you will have been inundated with articles and white papers hailing the emergence of various disruptive technologies and how they are going to change your world.

From cognitive computing, to the mainstream adoption of cloud applications, visual analytics and mobile apps; it is becoming clear that the traditional business systems landscape is changing, but what’s the real picture in the Finance Departments of corporate Britain?

I wonder how many people watched BBC2’s Who’s Spending Britain’s Billions documentary recently? In essence it was an expose on how local authorities pay management consultants large sums of money on the understanding of “operating model assessments” and “transformation programmes”. It was revealed that these firms often take a large percentage for delivering cost savings. The programme challenged the effectiveness and efficiency of private outsourcing firms‘ services in the public sector.

This also coincided with a report from ACCA’s Finance Transformation, SSC and Outsourcing Group about the challenge to Outsourcing service providers from Robotics Process Automation (RPA).

One of my great passions is understanding what makes a good leader. This is a complex subject.

What made Jack Welch great, may not be the same as what makes Richard Branson successful and Alex Ferguson revered across the world. Undoubtedly they had similarities.

As a CIO & IT Leadership head-hunter, it’s been both exciting and challenging to see how the CIO role has developed exponentially under the digital revolution. It’s been fascinating to see how so many CIOs have struggled to develop their skills to meet the demand of today’s technology savvy business stakeholders and end user customer.

As a director specialising in placing Transformation leaders, I know that in a highly competitive marketplace, there is nothing that damages programmes more than bad hiring. On talking with my network it’s apparent there’s an increasing groundswell of frustration with recruitment supply chains, especially in larger organisations.

Successful, experienced recruiters are successful because we leverage close, long term relationships with specialist candidate networks and senior and executive managers, doing everything necessary to keep those relationships focused on what each individual company needs. The personal relationships with individuals ensures the right team is placed for a transformation project, before, during and after launch.

Some 62% of CIOs recognised in the annual celebration of the UK’s leading CIOs, CTOs, IT directors and digital executives told CIO UK that they were finding it difficult to recruit the talent they need to drive transformation.

Part of the challenge for a CIO/CTO/ITD in hiring talent is they are often hampered by their own internal process. Almost every organisation is currently looking to drive some form of transformation to try and keep up to speed with an ever increasing technology savvy customer base and a truly interconnected world. As a result, there is an ever decreasing talent pool and everyone is fighting for the best seat around the lake! Moreover, separating the wheat from the chaff can be a highly skilled and time consuming job.