I implement planning and reporting software so, as you would hope, I think it's extremely beneficial for the vast majority of organisations.
But I also like to set realistic expectations of what implementing software will do.
I worked for one vendor where they had a customer that used their tool to analyse their spending per vendor, and then used those findings to negotiate better prices based on their total spend across all their entities (and it was a big group). This led to something like a 7% saving on opex, which is of course amazing.
But the vendor then happily put that percentage saving into their ROI calculator, and their salespeople went around saying that customers could all achieve that.
The point is, even that customer didn't achieve that because of the software. The software was, and always is, a tool that lets one do things; if you don't use it, it just sits there.
So I guess it is like a magic wand in that respect!
To put it another way, implementing planning and reporting software is just the beginning, really. When the project is done, you have a fantastic new tool to achieve the goals that your finance team most likely already had, but couldn't achieve before.
But you need to keep driving forward, executing those use cases, and following through on the findings you get from the tool. The tool can't do that for you, so be prepared for that work.
Of course, for our customers, we have plenty of advice to help you as you go through that process.
The good news is that it's not unusual for some issues to become easier to work through once you have the visibility that new software brings; so often, many issues are simply due to misalignment and misunderstanding. Which happen so easily when you've working in a pile of spreadsheets.
When you finally have, pardon the cliche, one source of truth, then that helps a great deal. But make no mistake - you still need to step up and drive change. The ones who do that, though, get fantastic visibility - and often career-enhancing results!
