As a finance team, you’re the experts in advising your company on smart financial decisions that will bolster growth and business sustainability. But no matter how knowledgeable, skilled and experienced you are, you’re missing out on loads of potential insights if you don’t build a solid tech stack.
What you put in your finance tech stack will enable your team, and the right toolkit can be the difference between success and failure—you want correct information fast and don’t want your tech to be a barrier to getting the job done.
We spoke to Juni CFO Ruben Arnbert, as well as Johan Strid, Director of FP&A at Juni, to find out what makes up the finance team's tech stack and what you should consider when building yours.
Just because you have some sort of existing tech stack doesn't mean it’s working as well as it could be. Juni CFO Ruben Arnbert says the first thing you should look at is how long it takes you to close your books, stating that “once in it takes longer than five days to get your financial results for the month, then I would start getting worried.”
He emphasises that “the purpose of a finance team is to guide the organisation and help it grow in a financially sustainable way. In order to do that, you need to understand how the business is performing—the sooner you do that, the sooner you can tell the business what it needs to change.”
Basically, the longer it takes you to close your books, the longer it takes for you to pinpoint what works and what doesn’t and advise the business accordingly. Those extra days at the end of each month add up and can ultimately impact the financial performance of your organisation.
Ruben also recommends taking a close look at how you spend your day-to-day, stating, “If you’re spending a lot of time doing bookkeeping and entering numbers into spreadsheets or your bookkeeping software, that’s just not efficient.”
This relates directly to how well your tools integrate—if they don’t connect, you’re left manually moving data from one platform to another, which is not only inefficient but also error-prone. As Ruben emphasises, “It's 2024, you shouldn't be typing stuff in manually.”
Ruben recommends looking at your finance operations like a pyramid. At the bottom layer, you have your core functionalities, so your bank and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, which should be integrated. “If those two talk to each other,” says Ruben, “then you should be able to more or less automate your accounting or make it very easy.”
In the middle layer of your pyramid, you have tools that help you analyse your company’s financial situation. Here, you’re looking at FP&A and business intelligence (BI) tools, which help you understand how the business is performing. “Here’s where you look at results and say, ‘This is what happened last month. I made money here, I lost money there. I invested that much and got this much out of it,’” shares Ruben.
Finally, the top layer of your pyramid is strategy and decision-making. At this point, you take the insights you’ve gained from your tools to communicate your recommendations to the rest of the business.
But that’s not the end of things—you also need tools like cash flow management solutions, accounts payable (AP) software, and financial reporting tools to optimise your finances. However, you can only figure out what additional solutions you need once you’ve completed the basic pyramid.
“Knowing what additional tools you need follows from understanding how your business is performing,” emphasises Ruben. “Then, you can see things like how much cash you have tied up in inventory, pointing to a need to improve your cash management process, or whether you pay hefty FX fees. But you won’t realise that until you can visualise broader business results.”
So from your essential day-to-day financial processes to helpful add-on tools, here are the areas that your finance tech stack should be helping you.
Your ERP software is the core of your finance tech stack, regardless of your business size. Ideally, your ERP should do the bulk of your accounting for you, managing day-to-day processes by collecting and organising key business information.
Understanding how the business functions across different departments is critical to successful financial planning, and your ERP can help with that, as it will bring together financial information from across the company in one place.
That’s why it’s so important to get an ERP that integrates with other pieces of your tech stack, like FP&A and accounts payable software, to make sharing and centralising your financial data more manageable. An ERP can also support inventory management, order management and customer billing, either in the ERP itself or by integrating with other tools.
When you’re just getting started, it might be enough to download your data, merge it into Excel, and build on it. But, if you want to benefit from automation, increased forecasting capabilities and more sophisticated visualisation, you’ll want to invest in FP&A software.
The right technology can help you manage your data and use it to model future scenarios for your business. As with most financial automation, the right FP&A software can help you free up time from manually handling your data and instead allow you to focus on analysis.
The main draw of a great FP&A tool is modelling. You want to see your financial history, how it looks at present, and how it could look in the future based on different scenarios. Because of this, FP&A tools are especially useful for budgeting—you can view historical data together with forward-looking views from your model.
Inevitably, your business will have different data coming from many sources—from sales to inventory to marketing. So manually identifying trends in this data and finding connections is no easy feat—that’s where business intelligence (BI) software can help.
BI software brings all this information together and provides practical insights to help you with data analysis, helping you better understand performance, from supply chain to sales. For example, Juni Insights acts as a single source of truth for all your ecommerce finances, from cash flow and ad spend to Amazon and Shopify analytics.
According to Ruben, “A business intelligence tool should help you visualise your most important metrics. It should connect to your ERP, fetching the necessary data, calculating KPIs and making projections.”
From processing cash flow to managing bank relationships, a treasury management solution (TMS) monitors all the influx and outflow of your company’s capital. By automating the process, a TMS gives you real-time, accurate insights into cash and liquidity while helping you keep tabs on your various accounts.
Ruben emphasises that a treasury management solution becomes more and more important “as you scale across jurisdictions, countries and industries. When you have multiple bank accounts in multiple jurisdictions with multiple banking partners, keeping track of all those transactions and cash movements becomes difficult.”
Ideally whoever you bank with will offer some accounts payable features, and you may be able to manage AP processes with your ERP. But if you need a more sophisticated solution, especially as your volume of supplier invoices increases, turn to accounts payable software.
For example, Juni’s accounts payable features automate the process by allowing you to auto-collect, pay and even finance your invoices in seconds. The platform automatically collects and scans invoices, pre-filling important payment details. Plus, you can easily import receipts and invoices and match receipts to transactions.
Contracts are essential to day-to-day operations, whether you’re closing deals with vendors or partnering with a new ad agency, but managing them manually can get to be time-consuming and inefficient.
While you may be able to handle contracts manually if you’re running a smaller business, as your company grows, so does the number of people who have to follow the proper legal processes. Having a tool to help streamline workflows and coordinate stakeholders can save time and make collaboration easier. In addition to helping you collect digital signatures quickly, these tools can also provide you with a library of contract templates to speed up the whole process.
Just because you automate your accounting processes doesn’t mean you’ll automatically be equipped to manage cash flow, which is why having a designated solution is important.
Juni, for example, is built to boost visibility and improve productivity for finance teams. Our virtual cards and multi-currency accounts, and accounting software and advertising integrations, give you a unified view of your finances. Our spend management features give you a deeper understanding of your cash flow with insights and analytics.
You can assign cards to employees and suppliers, giving you greater control of your transactions, plus configure custom notification settings. Juni can also help you optimise your cash flow management with cashback on all your eligible spend and access flexible credit with extended terms.
You may notice we didn’t mention Excel in the list above. But don’t underestimate your trusty Excel sheet—this tool should be a staple for every finance team, no matter what stage of growth you’re at. “We use Excel daily,” says Ruben. “It's so flexible that it's actually a very very good tool.”
For smaller teams, Excel can be helpful for FP&A and a great compliment to your ERP. For larger teams, it’s still versatile and ideal for a deep dive into your numbers. So from forecasting to expense management, Excel can have its place in your tech stack, helping you fill in gaps that your software doesn’t cover.
When setting up your tech stack, Ruben emphasises that “it's super important to break the process down into steps, which makes it much easier to identify where things aren’t working.” Here are three steps you can take to assemble your tech stack.
First things first—determine your organisation’s most pressing needs. Ruben suggests that you “start examining the very core fundamental layer, making sure that that works really well and that you don't spend a lot of time on admin. Then look at those numbers and let that drive what your next step should be.”
By doing this, you’ll uncover whether you need to start at the source and find an ERP that works better with your banking solution or if you’re lacking a powerful analytics solution.
Once you figure out which types of tools you need, it’s time to start researching the platforms themselves. Pay attention to what type of business each solution is designed for—if you’re a mid-market company operating in digital commerce, for example, you want a platform that understands the needs of ecommerce businesses like yours.
Additionally, weigh out the costs and benefits when doing your research. A tool may save you time, but needless to say, it’s not worth the investment if the price is going to put too much financial pressure on your business.
Looking into different solutions’ integration capabilities should happen at the research stage. So once you’ve selected and signed up for the various platforms you need, it’s time to set up integrations.
How interconnected your software is will determine how effective your tech stack is, so take advantage of all integrations available to you—this will minimise the need for manual input, as well as reduce the risk of costly human error.
Whatever tools you choose for your financial tech stack, your business needs are the most important thing to consider. As your operations evolve and grow, it’s essential to continually assess whether your tech is still working for you or whether you need to invest in new solutions. After all, tech is there to make your job easier and help you make better decisions for your business.
To summarise our recommendation of tools, remember the levels that Ruben breaks financial operations into:
Depending on the size and complexity of your business, you may not need all these add-on tools, or any of them for that matter. Just remember—start with the essentials to make sure your manual effort is minimal and you can close your books quickly and accurately.
Then, find analytics solutions that help you make strategic business decisions. And finally, fill in the gaps with tools that help you optimise your cash flow, automate more processes and run tighter financial operations.
A finance tech stack refers to the group of software tools that finance teams use to manage and automate financial processes, including accounting, budgeting, forecasting and reporting. The purpose of this tech stack is to streamline financial operations, ensure compliance and provide strategic insights through data analysis and financial management.
Tools that make up a finance tech stack can include ERP, FP&A, BI, treasury management, accounts payable, and cash flow management solutions.
A winning finance tech stack integrates tools that are adaptable, scalable and user-friendly, supporting the company's specific business processes and goals. It should provide real-time insights, enhance decision-making, ensure compliance and increase efficiency.
A finance tech stack needs to be customised to a business's needs, letting the finance team focus on strategic rather than routine tasks, in turn driving growth and promoting financial health.
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