Integrate Your Financial Software with a Flooring Specific System
The majority of small to medium businesses run on off-the-shelf financial solutions. Two such packages dominate the market, providing excellent tools for facilitating and recording financial transactions. However, as good as these tools are, they don’t cater to the specific operational needs of a flooring business, and their sole use as a business management system might be constraining your flooring business.
How can you tell if reliance on your financial software is holding you back?
“As good as off-the-shelf solutions can be, they don’t cater to the specific operational needs of a flooring business.”
1. The Need for Multiple Systems
Off-the-shelf financial packages do not address the complexity of flooring. In a flooring business, we inevitably see a host of systems, some digital and some manual, to manage the various aspects of the business. We might see as many as five or six different systems to manage samples, quoting, installation, inventory, and financial reporting. Multiple systems that don’t talk to each other will hamper your business. How many can you count in your business?
2. Double (and Triple)-Handling
Repeatedly typing in data as a job moves through its various stages is inefficient, time-consuming, and prone to omission and error.
“Multiple systems that don’t talk to each other will hamper your business. How many can you count in your business?”
3. Use of “Workarounds”.
To accommodate the needs of a flooring business within an off-the-shelf financial solution requires workarounds; ways to overcome the limitations of the software for the user. Workarounds can be tenuous, challenging to train and maintain, and they can create unnecessary complexity.
4. Access to Business Data is Difficult and Slow
With data siloed in numerous systems across the business, it is difficult to quickly get a picture of how the business is doing and where it might be heading.
“Manual systems can effectively put a cap on the growth of a business”
5. Business Feels Unscalable.
As hard as you work, you can’t get the growth you are looking for; your business is the same today as it was three years ago. Disparate and manual systems can work for businesses while small, but they can put a cap on the growth of a business; there comes the point beyond which these systems used on their own will constrain growth.
6. Inconsistent Revenue Recognition
When a financial system recognises purchases as a cost of sales in the month of purchase instead of the month of installation, profit and loss reporting will be lumpy and unreliable. For a business with sales and installation components, purchases should be recognised as a sales cost in the month the job is installed, not the month purchased. While a business is small, it might be possible to make allowance for these irregularities, but it becomes difficult, if not impossible, as the business grows.
“RFMS now integrates with Xero and shortly will similarly integrate with MYOB.”
7. Unreliable data hampering good decision making
All but the most inconsequential decisions should be made based on accurate data. Gut decisions have a place in a business, but even good gut decisions can be undermined if later we can’t justify that decision. Good data gives us the confidence to stick to our guns.
How many of these symptoms do you recognise in your business?
The purpose of this article is not to undermine the value of generic financial solutions. While RFMS comes with a full financial reporting and analysis functionality, we recognise that dedicated financial solutions have sophisticated features some business owners would be reluctant to give up. Added to that, accountants often prefer clients to work in one of the mainstream packages in the market.
There is good news for flooring dealers; you no longer have the stark choice between an off-the-shelf financial package versus the benefits of a fully integrated system such as RFMS. RFMS now integrates with Xero and shortly will similarly integrate with MYOB.
If you recognise your systems are holding your business back, we would like to show you how you can get the best of both worlds.
Chris Ogden is a consultant and Managing Director of RFMS Australasia (rfmsANZ.com), a supplier of IT solutions specific to the flooring industry. Chris has an extensive background in all aspects of the flooring industry, and he can be contacted at cogden@rfms.com.