For professional services firms, the cloud represents a huge opportunity to consolidate and streamline their finances. While many of these organizations have long relied on some combination of Microsoft Excel and on-premises solutions to handle tasks like budgeting, forecasting and accounting, several major business trends have pushed these types of software to their breaking points.
How cloud and mobile have reshaped financial software
For starters, the traditional hub-and-spoke approach to corporate networking is breaking down as more employees take up phones and tablets and move toward cloud-based services. A 2015 Forrester Research survey found that 40 percent of organizations now bypass the WAN at the branch office level, instead opting for direct traffic flows between mobile devices and the cloud.
"Mobile and cloud provide anytime/anywhere access to business applications."
This shift speaks volumes about the convenience of having anytime/anywhere access to business applications with nothing more than an IP-enabled device and an Internet connection. Compared with backhauling traffic through a data center or using a terminal server to remotely access services, the new bread and butter of mobile plus cloud is an easy choice.
Research firm Gartner has even predicted that one-quarter of all corporate network traffic will be between mobile devices and the cloud as soon as 2018. There is an opening here for cloud financial software-as-a-service to become the mobile worker's best asset on the job, since it provides:
- Integrations with a variety of third-party tools for customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning and professional services automation.
- Built-in security, updates and infrastructure management overseen directly by the SaaS provider.
- Comprehensive accounting functionality, from inventory and purchasing to vendor management and reporting applications, delivered to any device via the Internet.
These advantages add up quickly for professional services organizations. Under pressure to complete projects on time in accordance with accurate estimates, they can benefit from the speed of cloud accounting and ERP software as well as how these solutions help them adapt to different scenarios on the fly.
Phones can easily access many of the same cloud apps as PCs.
"[Professional services organizations] must be in alignment," observed the authors of a March 2015 white paper from Service Performance Insight. "They must also be flexible in order to change as needed. With information systems as the backbone of the organization, well-chosen systems provide the flexibility to integrate with other supporting applications as well as change as market dynamics dictate."
With almost every firm is looking to improve its bottom line, it makes sense to start by focusing on core financial applications such as ERP that provide the foundation for accessing and sharing information across the organization. By selecting a cloud-based solution, teams can save time in setting up, optimizing and integrating their most important software. For example, connecting ERP with CRM may even be possible through convenient pre-integrations performed by the cloud service provider.
Moreover, the subscription-based business model of SaaS gives professional services organizations flexibility in managing their costs. The time and money they save with cloud financial software can then be directed at improvements to other parts of the business.
