As your business expands and grows, keeping your financial processes in check is important. As a business owner, you can make your life that much easier by using a financial management solution (FMS). With an FMS, you can optimize and streamline your expenses, revenue, accounts payable, and receivable.  

What is a financial management system (FMS) solution?

A financial management system (FMS) is software that manages an organization's income, expenses and assets. Not only do they assist with supporting daily financial operations and tasks, but they help with optimizing processes and maximizing profits. 

FMS solutions help financial teams with the following:

• Streamline invoicing and accounts receivable
• Keep track of monthly cash flow
• Reduce accounting and human errors
• Deliver improved budgeting and forecasting
• Optimize and speed up financial reporting

One of the benefits of financial management systems is that they can integrate with an organization’s internal system – which consolidates financial and operational data. With this aggregated data, businesses can have a fuller snapshot of how their business is doing. Many companies today opt for cloud-based financial management systems, which help them scale quickly and efficiently.

Benefits of using an FMS

Using a modern FMS solution has many benefits. Not only can you keep track of your business finances, but you get a better understanding of your business as a whole. Here are a few benefits of using an FMS. 

Streamlined account processes

If you have an FMS solution in place at your organization, your finance team can automate many tasks and move away from time-consuming spreadsheets. With a built-in workflow and process, you can eliminate human error and complete your workload more efficiently and accurately. 

Ability to measure growth

Finance management systems with forecasting abilities allow organizations to measure their growth, budgets and business operations. This leads to better resource allocation and lets you control your business finances better.

Access to analytics 

Most FMS solutions mine data from both inside and outside of your organization. This means you can see real-time results and data to make informed decisions about your business going forward. Finance professionals can generate on-demand reports, predict risk and opportunities, and steer the company in a positive direction.

How do FMS solutions help scale your business?

Financial management is critical to an organization’s success as it determines how companies can improve revenue and profits while increasing the value of their business. Financial management is at the core of more organizations – so it’s crucial to nail down your financial process.

Reporting and analytics

Finance reporting and analytics is an ever-evolving function of any financial department. If there’s a more efficient way of tracking and reporting data, many businesses will upgrade and try it. 

FMS solutions provide benchmarking analytics and general best practices. When done correctly, benchmarking allows your FMS to share client and industry insights – helping you improve overall business operations.  

Collections management

With an FMS solution, you can reduce collection times and rates and minimize bad debts. Keep track of all your invoices and collections and streamline your business’s finances today. 

Accounts payable and accounts receivable

Accounts payable (AP) tracks and manages the money and amounts owed to suppliers, contractors and third parties. On the other hand, accounts receivable (AR) tracks incoming revenue – usually money owed by customers or credit extended to customers. 

Accounts receivable is when a financial professional manages collections and keeps records of the amounts owed (receivables). With an FMS solution, you can optimize this process and keep all your information in one place. 

Employee expense management

Employee expense management allows you to easily track staff expenses – from travel, food and beverages, entertainment, office supplies and more. In general, expenses are paid directly by the company or an employee. If an employee pays expenses, they’ll have to report and track the amount and get reimbursed later. 

Revenue management

Revenue management will help you increase your revenue by predicting consumer behaviour and demand. From there, you can optimize your products and services, adjust pricing and increase marketing and business profitability to get the best financial results. 

Key takeaways

Finance systems are designed to help business owners, and employees get more in control of their finances and boost revenue and performance. With QuickBooks Online Advanced, you can create custom workflows that make delegating tasks and responsibilities to members of your team even easier. You can even securely assign custom roles and permissions to your team members to ensure sensitive information is only accessible to your entrusted employees. Learn more about how QuickBooks Online Advanced is built to grow with your business here and how you can get started with a consultation today! 

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