Cloud Migration: 10 Reasons Why CFO’s Need to Act Now

According to Gartner, accelerated by the Covid crisis, the worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 18.4% in 2021 to total $304.9 billion. Gartner predicts the cloud will become the dominant deployment model across all areas of financial management applications by 2025.

Over the last few years, organizations have been moving operations to the cloud at a steady pace to increase collaboration and productivity. Uncertainty and the likely realities of the ‘new normal’ mean a dramatic rise in businesses charting the course for their journeys toward cloud computing and digital transformation.

After slow cloud adoption, CFO’s must act now to adapt to changing customer needs or risk losing market share to competitors who are taking advantage of improved performance and increased customer satisfaction.

Here are 10 reasons why now is the time to act.

1. The Power of a Single Platform – many on-prem finance solutions are bolted together through acquisition, making processes complex, prone to error, and time-consuming. Lack of up-to-date information, low employee engagement, and client satisfaction issues can be eradicated by leveraging one single platform for the entire O2C process. Cloud-based financial software can then seamlessly blend finance with business data, creating one single source of the truth.

2. Remote Accessibility – access information from any device, anywhere, at any time. This flexibility has been crucial during the pandemic and going forward will ensure operations remain effective and customer service levels remain high.

3. Be Proactive Versus Reactive – access to huge amounts of data in real-time, enables you to understand patterns, predict changing customer buying behavior, innovate quickly, and provide insightful, accurate information to stakeholders. Teams all contribute to the same system, in the same way. No more working in silos, and no more cumbersome sharing of data.

4. Actionable Artificial Intelligence – AI is not just about automating mundane tasks, it’s about enriching finance by providing the tools and analysis to help predict future growth and market opportunities. Leveraging AI across the entire O2C process allows organizations to predict late payment dates and disputes so finance teams can manage cash-flow more effectively, and provide better forecasting to stakeholders

5. Ease of Implementation – migration of financial applications can be achieved in as little as 90 days.  Organizations have been known to achieve 95% automation rates within the cash application department.  This is achieved by using dedicated tools powered by automation and security to ensure a seamless move of your data and workload to a cloud-based environment.

6. Total Cost of Ownership – automatic tracking of users and product usage makes TCO much lower and predictable versus on-premise solutions. The risk of overprovisioning servers disappears, there are no maintenance, space, or server cooling costs to worry about. Ongoing costs are simple and predictable to manage.

7. Enhanced Reporting and Compliance – powerful reporting enables finance teams to demonstrate internal and external regulatory compliance. Data and security concerns are also far less of an issue based on the levels of protection offered by cloud providers with state-of-the-art SecOps teams to guarantee the sfvafety and integrity of data.

8. Employee Engagement – looking in several places for data and customer information can be demoralizing for staff, especially when client requests cannot be answered in a timely fashion. Cloud offerings provide consistent user-friendly and intuitive experiences that increase productivity internally and transform the client experience.

9. Maximize Agility – with new technologies coming to the market every day, Cloud offerings can quickly adapt and react to the latest innovations, providing more meaningful and relevant customer service.

10. Accelerate Growth – Technology is more important than ever when it comes to organizational growth, whether it be through organic expansion or mergers and acquisitions. Applications in the cloud can quickly integrate new acquisitions to existing platforms and scale rapidly with demand.

By moving from an on-premise finance solution to a cloud offering, organizations will quickly transform processes, employee engagement, and the customer experience. Cloud offerings allow businesses to scale for growth, align closely with other departments, and ultimately have more control over business performance.

Danone was able to automatically process multiple remittance formats with features such as: Email Remittance Capture, Checks AI-OCR Capture, and Web Portal Remittance Capture. These features enabled the solution to capture remittance details through various formats, such as EDI files, OCR, check stubs, increasing its cash posting rate by 95% within 90 days of implementation. Email remittance capture & checks AI-OCR capture digitally captured and processed email and paper check remittances directly mapping them to the customer.