As a company has greater or more specific needs of financial control, it requires the use of more complex tools that enable greater accuracy and improved and more wide-ranging features.
What can financial control tools do?
Most financial control tools include a long list of functions and features, such as:
- Establishing targets
- Reworking forecasts
- Financial analyses
- Modelling business requirements
- Helping with planning, budgeting and forecasting
- Detecting errors and areas for improvement
- Optimising resources
Implementation phases of financial control tools
The implementation of a financial control tool by a company stems from a need. There comes a time when the organisation’s financial managers have insufficient means for controlling finances, e.g. a simple spreadsheet in Excel, and they begin to need more sophisticated mechanisms that provide them with more reliable data and a higher capacity for analysis.
At this point, the process of implementing a financial control tool is divided into the following steps:
- Choice of tool that is more in line with each company’s needs and goals.
- Adaptation or customisation of the tool: connection with specific information sources, option for programming the tool to be able to effectively interpret the various databases and integration with the organisation’s other systems and applications, such as ERP.
- Training workers in its use.Fortunately, this type of training is not complicated or particularly time-consuming, since these tools are very intuitive.In addition, the background and previous experience with other support instruments most professionals have form a very important base, since the concepts are similar.
Hiring the services of an advisory or consulting firm, especially during the implementation stage of the tool, which is the most complex, is highly recommended. This makes it possible to extract the maximum potential and achieve comprehensive and useful financial control adapted to targets in the shortest possible time and without major additional efforts in terms of staff and work hours.
