Seven Reasons Growing Businesses Love the Cloud

What does it take to get ahead when your business grows? The right knowledge at the right time. With so much competition in the modern business environment, there are certain factors that could separate successful businesses from unsuccessful ones. From automation to collaboration, we explore some of the top reasons the cloud is making business smarter, faster, and doing so more cost effectively than ever.

Recently, Procullux Ventures released a guide for businesses looking at their options for financial management software, sharing a recent guide written by finance and consulting expert Phil Wainewright, CEO of Procullux, co-founder of diginomica, and frequent ZDNet contributor. The guide, 7 Reasons to Move to Cloud Financials Now, explores just that, seven reasons the cloud is important for businesses in need of smarter financial management.

Seven Reasons Businesses Love Cloud Financials

While the entire guide is available here courtesy of Sage Intacct, we would like to provide you a brief overview of the cloud’s importance in the financial management initiatives for growing businesses.

Once upon a time, financial system kept to its core role of keeping a reliable historic transactional record. That was all. Today, however, it’s all about connectivity. While the core role has stayed the same, today’s finance department needs to make faster decisions based on more inputs. Connectivity matters, and today’s finance software needs to play a role in much more. Here are seven reasons that the cloud affords you this connectivity and competitive edge.

1. You Can’t Afford to Delay Changes: Businesses today need the flexibility to rapidly seize emerging opportunities or quickly deal with new challenges. But many are held back by disjointed processes and cumbersome systems that don’t easily adapt to new requirements.
2. Knowing What You Need to Know, Now: If the business doesn’t have a financial view of day-to-day operations, it can’t control spending or margins effectively. Having an in-depth view of today’s numbers—today—can help stakeholders make smarter decisions.
3. Clearing Logjams: Silos, spreadsheets, and other slowdowns have no place in the modern business. Automation may be one thing, but if you can’t merge processes automatically, you’ve taken one step forward and two steps back. Many cloud applications can help clear the logjams by breaking down barriers by automating integration.
4. The Lean Business: Up-and-coming businesses gain a significant competitive edge when they harness digital connectivity to streamline productivity and enhance outcomes. Unfortunately, many incumbents are held back by laborious processes, meaning highly-paid finance pros spend more time digging through spreadsheets than making improvements. This makes them unhappy and less productive, and more willing to jump ship at the first chance they get.
5. Finance for Finance, Not IT: Too often, it takes a village to generate a simple report. This is a problem. Many systems require the help of specialists to code a report, turning a simple report or change into a massive bottleneck. As the speed of businesses increases, they will need to either hire more people to code reports or find ways to make reporting easier through point-and-click generation and editing.
6. Getting More Done Faster: No one likes waiting for answers. While automation and integration are logical first steps, the picture is not complete until your people can communicate efficiently to co-ordinate and react promptly when exceptions arise. This creates a need for a third piece of connectivity: collaboration.
7. Answering Tomorrow’s Questions, Today: In today’s fast-moving, digitally connected world, enterprises have to be on top of their game to survive and thrive. This means that you need to keep an eye on the future, as well as the present.

The cloud is more than just cost savings and increased accessibility. When speed is the name of the game, and every day that you wait to move on something creates more and more missed opportunities, the cloud is there to help you automate, integrate, collaborate, and thrive. We welcome you to read the full report, filled with examples, explanations, and use cases here, and if you’re ready to learn more, contact us.