The Future of Financial Software: Why ERP Resellers Need Fintech Partnerships

As clients of the resellers of accounting and ERP tools scale both domestically and internationally, both the clients and the resellers face a unique challenge - while the accounting tools remain the backbone of financial operations, their limitations as standalone financial tools become increasingly apparent.

Growing businesses, and particularly those scaling cross-border, are in dire need of more robust, integrated solutions that can manage not just accounting, but a wide array of financial processes such as payments, payables, receivables, expense management, as well as treasury.

This shift presents both a challenge and an opportunity for software resellers. By collaborating with comprehensive fintech platforms, resellers can significantly enhance their offerings, drive profit, and provide added value to their clients.

In this article, we explore why these partnerships are becoming crucial and what resellers should look for in a fintech partner.

With every business expansion, be it domestic or international, comes increased complexity of financial operations. While ERP and accounting tools remain central to financial management, as more systems, such as banking platforms, expense management, payable and receivable tools are introduced, accounting often becomes disconnected from the rest of the financial ecosystem. This fragmentation results in a host of challenges:

Manual Data Consolidation: Finance teams find themselves manually aggregating data and consolidating it across multiple systems, which leads to errors and inefficiencies.

Time Loss: Recent studies suggest that disjointed financial ecosystems can lose a business even 10 days per month on manual financial processing and reconciliation.

Multiple Banking Relationships: Managing relationships with various banks for different services adds complexity to reconciliation and reporting.

Delayed Financial Insights: The lack of real-time visibility across multiple banks and currencies hinders timely and informed decision-making, which is crucial for further growth and taking advantage of opportunities.

Increasing Operational Costs: With growing transaction volumes, businesses frequently find themselves hiring additional finance team members to manage the increased workload. Additionally, the current team is incapable of focusing on strategic and value-adding tasks such as forecasting and planning.

On average, a business uses 170 applications and software across different departments.

While creating an advanced, well-integrated tech stack may work, it still does not address the core issues of inefficiencies and high costs. A comprehensive financial platform that covers multiple financial processes under one interface is, however, able to help software resellers tackle those problems head-on. These integrated platforms bring a transformative approach to financial management, consolidating fragmented systems, providing businesses with a unified treasury experience, and eliminating the need to juggle multiple disconnected tools and systems.

A key advantage of these advanced platforms is their seamless integration capabilities with the ERPs themselves. Many offer out-of-the-box integrations with existing accounting systems, ensuring that clients can smoothly transition onto a new system without disrupting their current processes, losing historical data, or risking downtime.

Automation is another crucial benefit of these comprehensive financial operation platforms as they automate a wide array of financial processes - from payables and receivables to expenses. The automations deliver crucial time-saving but also minimise human error, leading to more accurate financial data and reporting. Additionally, finance teams are freed from manual data entry and can redirect their focus towards more important activities.

Perhaps the biggest value of these platforms is the real-time visibility into cash position and treasury across multiple banks and currencies. This 360-degree, accurate view of financial status empowers businesses to make more informed decisions and take a proactive rather than reactive stance towards opportunities and challenges. This financial agility was previously difficult, if not impossible, to achieve with traditional, siloed systems.

Lastly, modern fintech solutions are designed with scalability in mind. They can support clients' growth, regardless of whether they're scaling domestically or globally. With this flexibility, businesses can continue on the growth trajectory without worrying about their financial management, even when their needs become more complex as the platform scales and adapts accordingly. It's a future-proof solution that provides long-term value, making it an attractive offering for software resellers looking to build lasting relationships with their clients.

Partnering with a fintech platform can bring numerous advantages to software resellers:

Expanded Product Offering: Software resellers can expand their product portfolio with a complete financial operations solution that complements their existing ERP and accounting tools and add new revenue streams as a result.

Improved Client Retention: With a comprehensive financial operations solution well integrated with the ERP, clients are more likely to make the most out of the accounting tool. This leads to increased product stickiness and boosts customer lifetime value.

Competitive Edge: Providing an all-in-one solution that addresses the evolving needs of growing companies and can be tailored to their needs, software resellers can differentiate themselves in the market and stand out from the competition.

Access to New Markets: Larger clients and different verticals will have specific and more complex financial needs. With a more comprehensive package on offer, ERP and accounting tool resellers can tap into new verticals and acquire larger clients.

All these, in the long run, improve the reputation of the software reseller among clients and prospects and increase profitability.

Partnership with the right comprehensive financial operations platform doesn't just benefit the software reseller - it benefits the clients too as it helps them achieve significant improvements in their financial operations.

Time Savings: By integrating the accounting tool with the financial operations platform, clients can automatically sync contacts, post bills and invoices, collect payments from customers and pay suppliers as well as reconcile business expenses. This can save close to 200 hours per year and a lot of cognitive load which the financial team can redirect into strategy and planning.

Cost Reduction: Streamlined operations mean fewer errors, increased efficiency, and potentially no need to hire additional staff members or add extra software. Combined together, clients can expect even an 80% reduction in operational costs.

Improved Decision-Making: A complete, real-time visibility into cash position and treasury across multiple banks and currencies enables better financial planning and more informed decisions, which is essential for sustained growth. Finance and treasury managers no longer need to log in to multiple systems and manually aggregate data to get an idea of revenues or spending just to find out that, by the time all is consolidated, the data is outdated and cannot be acted upon.

Improved Supplier and Customer Relationships: Automation of payables and receivables allows businesses to better manage their liabilities and assets. This means they can control when and how much to pay. No sales invoices go unpaid and they can negotiate better payment terms with suppliers, which leads to stronger business relationships and, further down the line, optimised working capital.

Partnerships between ERP and accounting tools software resellers and financial operation platforms have the potential to revolutionise the financial software scene. When picking the partner, there are, however, a few key things to consider:

Comprehensive Solution: Look for platforms that offer a wide range of financial operations tools under one roof. At minimum, they should offer accounts payable, receivable, expense management, and some form of treasury management and allow your client to manage multiple companies from one log-in.

Seamless Integration: Ensure the platform offers a two-way integration with the accounting tool or ERP your clients are using. The key here is also to look at the implementation - the more time-consuming the integration is and the more teams and people need to be involved in the setup, the more problems you will run into down the line and the more dissatisfied your clients will be.

Scalability: Choose a solution that can support businesses as they grow, both locally and internationally. This means opting for solutions that offer access to not only multiple financial products but also currencies - the base currencies your clients are using, such as GBP, EUR, USD are a must, but the more currencies the better, and that should apply to both sending and collecting payments.

Dedicated Support: Opt for partners that offer premium support to your clients, from onboarding to ongoing assistance. This includes not only documentation, videos, and support centre but also a support team that is ready to answer any questions. Your clients are also their clients.

Go-to-Market Support: Select partners that provide marketing collateral and sales enablement tools to help you promote the offerings effectively. Fintechs move fast and they add new features constantly. You want to pick a partner that will keep you in the loop about the newest addition to the platform.

Fyorin partners with resellers of accounting tools and ERPs to help them provide complete, scalable, global financial operations solutions to their clients while growing their business. Our partners such as Scope solutions have helped dozens of their clients improve their financial operations while improving profitability at the same time.

If you are interested in joining our partnership programme, send us an email to [email protected] or fill out the form and we will be in touch!