In today’s economy, more than ever before, a business needs to know exactly how it is performing based on real-time information available 24/7, delivered seamlessly on a mobile device and limited to the essentials, said Henri Hattingh, MD of AWCape, a company providing professional ERP, CRM and system engineering systems to the marketplace.
Traditional accounting or ERP systems were not designed to deliver above expectations, hence the business decision maker is often unaware of how his business is performing.
Realtime
Most reporting systems are aligned towards delivering financial reports several days or, in some cases, weeks after the end of a month. This may be helpful in analysing past performance, but it is hopelessly insufficient to keep a business manager aware of daily facts to help him make swift business decisions.
Available 24/7
Traditional reporting is delivered to the business manager not when he needs it, but according to the ability of the business function that prepares and distributes the report.
Delivered seamlessly on a mobile device
Traditional systems distributes reports in such a manner that it is not easily accessible on a mobile device such as iPhone, iPad or Android device, which means the manager does not have the performance of his business at his fingertips.
Limited to the essentials
A traditional system often overwhelms the manager with detailed and complex reports. We advise a business manager to define a limited number of metrics (KPI’s) keeping him/her fully aware of the business performance. By nature of this definition, not all of performance metrics will be made available from the accounting system. For example, it is essential that a top executive closely follows his organisation’s sales month to date and GP, compared to same time last year in order to achieve company sales targets. Similarly, monitoring the daily Order Book or Work In Progress status. Furthermore, he is tracking the number of visits (clicks) to his company website on a daily basis over the last year to adjust his marketing campaigns and monitors staff productivity from the company’s time sheet system.