Accounting / Financial Management / Enterprise Management

Often referred to as bookkeeping, accounting, financial management or even enterprise resource planning (ERP). At the core you will find basic accounting to track revenue and costs and produce income statements and balance sheets.

The trend has been to expand the financial software to include all business processes from one end to the other. This means that components like customer relationship management (CRM), eCommerce, payroll, human resources and many others may be included.

Considerations

• Integration

  Integration between applications can be technically challenging and time consuming. Determine what data will need to be loaded initially and periodically from sources like payroll, point of sale, credit cards, banks and web store.

• Solution Approaches
  • Enterprise Suite

    These solutions can accommodate a wide range of businesses and business processes that are common across many types of business. These solutions are also referred to as "horizontal" solutions.

  • Specialized/Niche Applications

    These solutions—often referred to as "best of breed"—offer a specialized focus for a specific type of business or for a specific business process. While the solutions may offer a close fit for some business needs, they may lack other pieces of functionality. In order to complete a business process it may be necessary to build in integration to another application. Suppose, for example, that a construction firm finds a stand-alone project management application that will perform 80 percent of its core business processes. Unfortunately, the construction firm finds that the project management application does not include an accounting component to collect costs and generate bills. The company will then also need to figure out how to integrate with their accounting application.

• Key Product Differentiators

  Some key features that can be deciding factors and thus quickly differentiate applications include the following:

  • Multilanguage

    Display application pages in different languages. For example, if you have workers in Mexico you may need them to see pages in Spanish while workers in the United States would need see the pages in English.

  • Multicurrency

    Accept transactions in different currencies and translate to a base currency.

  • Multilocation

    Identify transactions, profit and loss associated with different locations.

  • Multi-user

    Include users from different parts of the company with varying levels of system authorization.

Implementation Options

There are two primary options for implementing accounting solutions.