Financial Reporting

Gartner has released its first-ever Magic Quadrant for Core Cloud Financial Software Management Suites! Concentrating solely on Cloud-based ERP which serves mid-sized, large and global organizations. At the onset, Gartner has excluded all players serving SMBs niche. This report revolves around the bigger ERP players.

While we’re waiting for the Critical Capabilities report which Gartner promised to deliver in the third-quarter of this year, join us in rehashing this first-of-its-kind report from Gartner.

Some surprising results

At Velan, we took a quick gasp when we first saw it. In the niche players’ quadrant, there lies SAP! SAP is not going to take this lightly especially considering the fact that ERP & Finance are its core strengths and S/4HANA is doing the rounds. I mean, when was the last time you saw SAP in the niche players’ quadrant? I can’t place a single MQ (except this one) where SAP wasn’t a visionary or more often, a leader. Can you?

Velan has served quite a few European clients who favor SAP over all others, while the Americans lean towards Oracle. For the record – regardless of the tools our clients use, we have the ability to dexterously handle GL, AR, and AP in an offshore model.

Oracle is way ahead in this game! Cheers to that license-ridden beast. Considering our experience with clients so far, we sincerely believe SAP should’ve been positioned right next to Oracle in the top-right quadrant, but here’s what Gartner notes as reasons for placing SAP in the lower-left:

• Only SAP Business ByDesign fits the inclusion criteria set for this report. May include SAP S/4Hana is a possible candidate for future inclusion.
• ByDesign targets SMBs with 1500 employees or lesser.
• “SAP Business ByDesign is primarily sold as a suite solution; SAP has limited focus on line-of-business finance marketing and sales.”⁺
• According to Gartner, ByDesign risks being overshadowed by SAP S/4HANA Cloud since SAP is focusing considerable marketing effort in the HANA direction.

Gartner also notes that:

• SAP Business ByDesign is most often used as a standalone financials system.
• It can scale to support upper-midsize organizations.
• “Gartner is aware of organizations using SAP Business ByDesign that have revenue in excess of $1 billion”⁺

Do you feel that Gartner never got around to dissecting the SAP ERP solution as a whole? Shaun from SCMFocus sure finds this “niche player” tag quite strange.

Some Expected Outcomes

It’s nice to see Sage Intacct reigning as a visionary, followed closely by Microsoft, FinancialForce, and Accumatica. We’ve not seen many clients using Accuamtica and this fact has been outlined by Gartner as well, in the Cautions section for Accumatica – Gartner notes that Accumatica lacks brand awareness and its marketing, focusses more toward the suite as a whole and loses out on the professionals and prospective clients in the financial realm.

With a good share of our clients using Workday, Intacct, and FinancialForce, we hope to see a lot more clients adopt these tools owing to their position on the quadrant.

The only two giants who’ve managed to position themselves in the leaders’ quadrant are Oracle and Workday. Between Oracle and Workday, the market footprint is oceans apart i.e. while Oracle boasts of a market cap of 209.97 billion and spreads across 7 continents, Workday only has an approximate market cap of 20.5 billion. Workday leaves behind giants like Epicor, Deltek, Microsoft and SAP (debatably, unless SAP wanted the industry to move on to S/4HANA & the upcoming quarter’s report may perhaps include it).

Intacct’s completeness of vision means this tool is in for the long haul – we can almost see it hitting the top right quadrant very soon.

Whatever the tool, rely on Velan

Velan offers exemplary outsourced accounting and bookkeeping services for CPAs and firms. Whatever be the ERP of your choice, Velan’s resources are adept and experienced in a wide range of Cloud-based ERP systems! We’ve worked with clients big and small. Whether you’re an SMB or a larger-than-life enterprise, Velan can offer you a team of accountants like no other.

For all your outsourced accounting & bookkeeping needs, all you need to do is call us @ +1-860-215-4997. Velan handles everything, right from bookkeeping to full-fledged accounting using any and every ERP software – General ledger (GL), Accounts Payables (AP), Accounts Receivables (AR), reports and analysis. Velan can help you cut down on your staffing, training & infrastructure costs by providing an extended cost-effective offshore team.

Reference:

1. https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-43I9UCB&ct=170619&st=sb
2. + marks direct excerpts from the report

Real-time Financial reporting basically means that an event must be reported as and when it occurs rather than in the later stage. In this same context, real-time accounting means retrieval of information that is stored in the accounting system by reducing the lag between the recording time of accounting and the time of availability. Real-time accounting is used to make accurate information available as soon as possible.

Some benefits of Real-time accounting and financial reporting:

1. Removing batch processes: Real-time accounting often ensures that information is updated at one point in time. For example, when an approved invoice gets posted, the vendor accounts must be posted, and the same should be updated on the expense account and in the general ledger. Simultaneously, inventory and other activity costing should be kept updated. This will ensure that errors are minimized and all updated information will be made available to all the stakeholders.
2. Syncing different books: Most businesses today distribute some part or all parts of their accounting operations. This means data redundancy is high. Now, applying real-time accounting can eliminate the need to replicate the data and it also helps the postage of data in more than one database simultaneously.
3. Informed decisions can be made: Real-time accounting ensures that information is being updated on a regular basis, which is best for the needs of the organization. This availability of the financial information in a timely fashion will facilitate the management to be highly agile in their dynamic business environment.
4. Information centre: Real-time accounting makes the creation of information hubs possible, thereby allowing access to many users at a given point in time. It also provides the facility for the information to be presented in any format desired.
5. Enhancing productivity: Visibility to financial information is more with real-time accounting. This helps the organization in being dynamic and re-prioritizing the tasks based on need. This had been found to enhance the compliance, productivity, and accuracy.

So, why should you outsource real-time accounting?

The one challenge that organizations face in implementing real-time accounting is the burden it would place on the existing resources. Outsourcing real-time accounting provides access to a whole new level of the trained and expert team in all aspects of finance and accounting. You can also get access to the latest technology available. All these not only ensure accuracy of data, but also cost efficiency. You will not have to invest on infrastructure or the resources. Plus, when you outsource real-time accounting, paper based reports would become obsolete, which means data can be made available anywhere at any time. By and large this will help the company to stay proactive.

To enjoy all the above mentioned benefits of outsourcing your real-time accounting, do contact at +1-860-215-4997. We can help you figure out the ways to improve your productivity and profitability.