According to a recent survey conducted by CFO Magazine, scalability is the number one concern for CFOs when choosing an ERP software package. Companies in the technology and professional services industries can experience explosive growth from technological advances, which change their business models in ways that are not always possible to predict. For the professional service or technology company, there is the constant need to improve processes with automation, and develop sophisticated ways to keep customers satisfied. While CFOs in these industries may understand how to select software solutions that meet their current needs, choosing one that’s right for future needs may prove to be much more cumbersome.
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Accounting Software Scalability is Tied With The Underlying Architecture
In finding the best-fit accounting or ERP solution, the answer lies not in the software itself but in the underlying software architectural strategies and development processes used to meet changing environments. In other words, consider if the software was purposefully designed to morph and meet unspecified changing environments. The discussion can get deeply technical and it’s easy to get lost in the weeds, so for our purposes here, we’ll simplify and generalize things quite a bit.
Historically, most client/server ERP systems that were originally designed to run on-premises were typically built with proprietary data mapping tools. These proprietary modules allow licensed developers with specific proprietary domain knowledge to use the mapping tool to cross-reference and import (or export) specific kinds of data, to or from another unrelated software. In some cases however, some of these mapping tools could be limited in their abilities. Hence if the mapping tool used for your particular ERP does not support the data, processes or software that you are trying to integrate, you may be out of luck. And in other words, this could open up your wallet for potentially time consuming and expensive custom programming to integrate other systems.
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Cloud Accounting Changes Integration and Scalability Options
Cloud computing is now delivering on the promise of providing open but secure platforms that make it easy to build applications that integrate with others using Application Programming Interfaces or APIs. Since APIs are based on open standard XML web services it gives developers easy access to bring data in and out of an ERP application to other application(s) using an Internet connection.
Unlike traditional client/server models, web services allow software packages and organizations to exchange data without specific knowledge of each other’s data schemas. Because communication is usually in XML, web services allow disparate applications to communicate without expensive custom coding.
The critical point to understand is: If the API (or even a client/server mapping tool) was not coded to support bringing data into or out of ALL of the myriad tables, rows and columns of a database, you run the risk of not being able to inexpensively, reliably, and quickly integrate other data and processes into that database.
Leading cloud accounting and ERP packages such as Intacct, come out-of-the-box with APIs that make it easy to integrate with other areas of your business including, CRM and HR solutions as your business grows. At the end of the day, a “best of breed” ERP package scales with your business now and in the future, while easily integrating with other software solutions that you may need to increase productivity.
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