The Importance of Data Integration in Finance and Accounting

As a business grows, one of the major obstacles faced is a lack of integrated internal systems. Many organizations utilize a “best of breed” approach, where decision-makers will select software that is a good fit for their industry, size, etc, and purchase them for company use. This software will usually lack the necessary requirements to seamlessly transfer information from one another, and instead, depend on someone to manually move and consolidate data between the platforms.
The alternatives? Well, you can opt for an all-in-one system, but that may not be ideal for your business either. Especially if you’ve already invested significant resources into your software, have your historic data stored there, and will want to keep separate databases for security reasons. For this reason, seamless integration is key to ensuring that your business keeps its internal structures and avoids intricate manual transfers. A lack of integration can lead to a number of problems:

‍Databases that don’t communicate with one another

‍Having a different database for sales and financial accounting that isn’t integrated means that a business will have to spend a significant amount on human capital transferring data between one system to another. To add, each database will have different methods of calculations and formulas, different ways of presenting information, and different information collected. Reconciling such differences and piecing together the data will increase the likelihood of human error and simply waste time. In addition, you miss out on insights and opportunities that might have developed from compiling and reviewing the data altogether.

‍Data Redundancies

‍Unintegrated databases also waste employees’ time by making them re-enter data that already exists within other systems. Without realizing, this can increase the likelihood of data inconsistencies, which combined with the need for multiple entries, can lead to confusion amongst staff.

‍Exorbitant IT Time and Costs

‍Without proper integration software for your different databases, your IT staff will have to spend the majority of their time attempting to integrate them on their own. They waste enormous amounts of time and energy having to create and maintain hodgepodge tools to transfer data. When softwares are updated with new versions, IT will then need to do further maintenance to make sure different versions are able to work together. This takes up valuable time for your IT staff and pushes the costs of maintenance through the roof.


A solution?

‍With the use of AI, innovative tools, and a data-driven approach, integration platforms like bluesheets are able to cut costs while providing a high-level financial overview. bluesheets proprietary data platform is able to work between disparate systems and sync data for a fraction of the cost of buying a new all-in-one software or maintaining your own integration. bluesheets user, Guzman y Gomez, is a prime example of a business that took traditional routes to solve this problem; by hiring engineers and tasking them with integration developments, they had spent a significant amount of time and resources trying to connect their data. Ultimately, they abandoned the integrations in favor of using bluesheets’ middleware solution.

“By connecting our systems over bluesheets, we’ve entirely eliminated the need to build and maintain these integrations ourselves. It’s been a huge cost saving. Best of all, with all our revenue channels now connected to bluesheets, our entire management team can view performance each day. We’re no longer waiting weeks to see the numbers” — Josh Bell.