As the 3rd part of our trilogy around integrating and automating the posting and analysis of sales data, I wanted to delve deeper into the various solutions we offer to businesses to ensure they are right on top of their sales and operational data.
Our solutions are mainly driven by solving problems in individual businesses. In relation to Sales, the problems can largely be categorised into 2 types. Automation or Understanding. Our solutions provide both as these are so closely interlinked. Without automation, you cannot have understanding and you will not achieve understanding without automation.
Many solutions will typically focus on one thing or the other. As an example, you can look at system connectors like Zapier or existing integrations but often the aim of these is to perform a task. Simply getting the minimum amount of data required and sending it from A to B. Any other information is not required and therefore ignored. This will be the basis for most integrations and then you will have reports in your operating system and reports in your financial system you must marry up together, but at least the posting of your accounting data is automated which will free up some finance team resource to collate this data for you.
Alternatively, you could have a reporting/analytics tool that can receive all the various pieces of information and you can build some interesting reports with something like Tableau or Power BI but in turn, this hasn’t automated any of your finance functions. The potential issue is that the solution has just created a new number that you or your finance team need to check, maintain, and reconcile to.
Our solution ensures both items are tackled at the same time. When we build our integrations, we pull all of the data into our Reporting and Analytics tools, including data from the operational and financial accounting systems. Where we collect the operational information from the source system, we check it is correct, decide if it is needed for reporting and/or in the accounting system. This means that we can report on anything we desire and help business owners truly understand their businesses’ performance. If the data is needed in the accounting system, we will create the transaction and post it into the accounting system and ensure it reconciles to the operational data.
When we post this information to the accounting system, we can also decide what we want to create. So, if an invoice is needed, we can instruct the system to create an invoice ready to be sent as well if this is needed.
What this all means is that we can achieve up to 95% automation of financial processes and our only challenge in this is obtaining the data, but we have very secure and sophisticated methods of achieving this. At the same time, we are not only automating and providing a clear audit trail but also providing an understanding of the costs involved in generating these sales with a view to improving operational performance.
We would encourage all businesses to ensure they choose a holistic solution that caters to both their finance and operations teams. If you want any advice on how this can be achieved please do not hesitate to contact us at www.4pointzero.co.uk
