2022 predictions feature content from Oracle NetSuite

  • Nicky Tozer, Senior Vice President, EMEA at Oracle NetSuite

  • 04.01.2022 11:59 am

NetSuite recently announced SuiteBanking, which integrates fintech into its cloud ERP suite. Why is this development important?

Effective financial management is the cornerstone of any business. NetSuite cloud ERP is already used by more than 28,000 customers globally for key aspects of finance and accounting, such as financial close, expense management, and revenue management. 

Yet the unexpected disruptions of the last 18 months have only served to reinforce the importance of having total control over forecasting and cash flow.

NetSuite enables customers to connect financial management with other critical aspects of their business, such as inventory, CRM, and ecommerce. With that in mind, we recognised an opportunity to extend this functionality, further empowering businesses to make strategic decisions with confidence.

SuiteBanking makes it possible to bring together automated accounts payable and accounts receivable processes, making it fast and easy to pay bills, send invoices and get paid — all from within NetSuite. Customers can also benefit from integrations with banking partners, the first of which is HSBC, that give access to other services like a global digital wallet and virtual payment card. Some SuiteBanking capabilities are available to NetSuite customers today, and we will continue to unveil new features in the future.

How does SuiteBanking impact the role of finance and accounting teams?

Transactions and payment processing bring a host of manual work for most finance teams, from entering data, dealing with banks, monitoring transactions or processing payments. 

Accounting teams often spend several hours every day on repetitive tasks to provide information that is critical to the business, but this manual approach is failing to deliver the real-time view of critical financial data that is essential.

Errors are common, corrections take even more time, and accounting data is out of date — often before it’s been entered into a spreadsheet or system. Finance teams are stuck working on the same repetitive processes, while business leaders rarely have a comprehensive picture of their cash requirements or cash flow.   

Any fast-growth business simply can’t afford the delays inherent in manual data entry, or to be reliant upon labour-intensive personal interactions with banks or monitoring transactions from multiple systems or processing payments. Now this doesn’t have to be the case.

By bringing ERP and fintech together, we’re enabling finance teams to automate all processes into one single suite. It brings a new level of insight and control over all aspects of the financial operation, so businesses can invest and expand, with the reassurance they are maintaining a healthy cash flow.

By saving time through automation and integrated processes, we’re also enabling teams to reclaim time and energy that can be invested in strategic projects that help drive profitability and growth.

What are the specific challenges that SuiteBanking solves?

Through SuiteBanking, we are empowering our customers to realise multiple benefits, including increasing on-time payments, reducing days sales outstanding, improving the timeliness and accuracy of employee expense reports, and matching transactions with their business bank account.

The specific features of SuiteBanking include:

  • International Payments: provides customers with a global digital wallet to make and accept payments from a single account, utilising HSBC’s global footprint and presence in more than 60 countries, instead of using country-specific payment providers that result in separate AP processes. This makes it easy for customers to make and receive international payments and removes the complexities of opening and managing multiple foreign bank accounts.

  • Accounts Payable: automated invoice scanning and general ledger code assignment, three-way invoice matching, and automated outbound payments, with users able to select from multiple payment options. 

  • Accounts Receivable: automated creation and scheduling of invoices, and collections with automated payment reminders.

  • Bank Reconciliation: real-time insight into the status of inbound and outbound payments, and the matching and reconciling of cleared transactions for improved cash flow visibility. 

  • Spend Management: customisable approval workflows, expense policy rules and budget validation capabilities help managers avoid overspending by automatically comparing open purchase requests to available budget.

How can we expect such technologies to evolve in the coming months and years?

A Deloitte report on fintech disruption published in December 2020 highlighted how, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, we have entered a new phase of the financial technology (or fintech) sector. 

This means that one of the first challenges is increasing scope, and we’ll see that addressed over the coming months and years. The integration of fintech into the NetSuite platform is one example of how this new phase is evolving and how we are enhancing our capability through our partnership with HSBC. 

Licensed financial institutions and banks will likely play a new role in business, enabling businesses to not only streamline their internal financial processes, but expand this to offer new, differentiated customer experiences. 

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