Most finance directors I have worked with reach the same point eventually. Month-end is taking too long, nobody quite trusts the numbers coming out of the reports, and someone in a senior meeting says “we need a new system.” It feels like a decisive moment. The spreadsheets have had their day, and the answer is a proper platform.
The problem is that the system isn’t the answer to the problem they actually have.
What I have seen, across organisations of genuinely different sizes and sectors, is that the spreadsheet creaking under pressure is rarely the root cause. It is a symptom of something that happened much earlier, usually without anyone noticing. Finance built its own way of tracking things. HR built something separate. Operations did their own thing. Nobody sat down and designed how data was supposed to move through the business. It just evolved, function by function, over years, and now there are twelve versions of the same headcount report and none of them agree.
An ERP or a new finance system doesn’t fix that. It gives the mess a more expensive home.
The conversation that doesn’t happen often enough
Before any system gets selected, there is a conversation that needs to happen about how data actually flows through the business today, where it originates, where it gets touched, and what happens to it along the way. Most organisations skip this, not because they are careless, but because it is unglamorous work and there is pressure to show visible progress. Choosing a system vendor feels decisive. Mapping your data flows feels like going backwards.
But the organisations that skip it tend to find themselves eighteen months into an implementation with the same arguments about numbers they had before, just with a six-figure software licence on top.
The questions worth asking before you start a system selection are straightforward, even if the answers aren’t. Where does a piece of data enter the business and how many times does it get re-entered before it reaches a report? When finance and HR look at headcount, are they using the same definition, or have they each built their own? When the CFO pulls together a forecast, how many sources is she reconciling manually, and why?
These are not technical questions. They are business questions, and they tend to surface a picture of how the organisation actually operates, rather than how it thinks it operates.
What actually works
The finance transformations I have seen land well share a common thread. Before the system conversation starts in earnest, somebody has done the work of understanding the current state honestly. Not to produce a lengthy report that sits on a shelf, but to get clear on a few things: which data is genuinely shared across functions and which is duplicated, where the ownership of key definitions sits (or doesn’t sit), and which processes are adding value versus existing because nobody has questioned them in years.
That groundwork changes the shape of a system selection significantly. Instead of evaluating platforms against a generic list of features, the organisation knows what it actually needs the system to do, what problems it is solving, and what the data model needs to look like to support the business rather than constrain it.
It also surfaces the cross-functional conversations that need to happen early rather than late. HR and finance need to agree on how the workforce is defined before either of them configures a system. Operations and commercial need to align on how costs are attributed before anyone builds a reporting structure around them. Getting those conversations on the table at the start, rather than discovering the misalignment six months into an implementation, is where a significant amount of time and cost gets saved.
If you are approaching this point
If your organisation is at the stage where the spreadsheets are creaking and a system feels like the next move, the most useful thing you can do before starting a procurement process is to treat the situation as a prompt to understand your business better, not as a trigger to start shopping for software.
That doesn’t mean slowing down. It means making sure the investment you are about to make lands somewhere solid, rather than on the same foundations that created the problem in the first place.
If any of this sounds familiar and you are working out where to start, I am happy to have that conversation. You can reach me at neilalderson@neilaldersonltd.co.uk or through the contact page on this site.