ERP Integration for Successful Financial Planning

As any business manager or owner knows, financial planning is impossible without a thorough knowledge of how your business’ day-to-day operations function. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a foundational type of software that allows you to oversee these daily operations simultaneously, including accounting, supply chain operations, project updates, and more. This form of oversight can be massively beneficial for making careful business and budgeting decisions, and Shopify even identifies this form of planning as the secret to many financially successful ecommerce companies.

The key, however, is to ensure that your ERP suite integrates all necessary data sources to give you the most comprehensive overview of your company and all its interworking parts. This means that your chosen ERP package has to be unique to your business needs, and the specific metrics and factors that matter most. For example, if you’re an ecommerce business you want to ensure your ERP suite includes sales information and customer metrics. Alternatively, if you’re a manufacturing company, it’s more important to incorporate all your various supply chains and delivery timetables in your suite. No matter what business you run, the integration of all these various factors working in tandem is crucial.

What’s the benefit of ERP integration? Efficiency, less manual work, and more comprehensive financial planning. Without a centralized ERP program, you likely juggle numerous software programs and workplace processes. In sales, you may have to manually log customer sales, and use another system to process payments, and yet another to update inventory. With ERP integration, a sale could be made while automatically processing the payment and adjusting inventory simultaneously across all systems.

ERP Integration as a Cost-Saving Strategy

While ERP integration is chiefly beneficial due to its ability to streamline business operations, it also makes financial planning much easier and more centralized. Without ERP integration, you might find yourself spending more on administrative and data entry work. Alternatively, having all of your business operations seamlessly integrated saves costs while allowing you to visually see profits, losses, and trends within your ERP suite. This means you can identify where supply chain disruptions are occurring, how sales are being impacted, when and how customers are spending their money, and even stock market trends. This allows for more accurate forecasting and allows you to budget expenses appropriately.