A New Finance System
Won’t Fix Broken Processes
Three myths that lead good organisations into
expensive disappointment and what to do instead
Myth 1: A new finance system will fix our reporting
No it won’t. Not on its own.
New software is a container. What matters is what you put inside it. Your chart of accounts, your account headings, your departments and cost centres, your budget. If those haven’t been designed properly, the new system will produce the same confusing reports as the old one. Just faster!
We’ve seen organisations spend significant sums on implementation only to find six months later that the finance team is still running spreadsheets on the side to make the numbers usable. The software wasn’t the problem. The structure underneath it was.
Before you evaluate a single system, ask: what decisions do we actually need our finance system to support? Who needs to read the reports? What do they need to understand? Answer those questions first. Then choose your software.
Myth 2: A bigger system means better insight
More features do not equal more clarity.
In fact, a more powerful system in an under-structured environment can make things worse. There are more places for confusion to hide. More reports that nobody quite understands. More dashboards that look impressive and say very little.
The organisations I work with that have the clearest financial picture are not always using the most sophisticated software. They’re using software that fits how they’re actually managed and they’ve taken the time to set it up around the decisions that matter.
Insight comes from structure, not from horsepower.
Myth 3: Once the system is live, the hard work is done
Go-live is not the finish line. It’s the start of a different kind of work.
The technical implementation is, in many ways, the straightforward part. What’s harder (and what gets underestimated almost every time) is the human side. Does the finance team understand why things have changed? Can budget holders read their new reports? Does the CEO trust the numbers?
If the answer to any of those is no, the system hasn’t really landed. It’s just been installed.
The change sticks when people understand it, not just when it goes live. That means coaching, explanation and time. Especially for the team members who were most comfortable with the old way of doing things.
So what’s the real question?
Most finance systems aren’t broken. They’ve just accumulated. Nobody sat down and designed them from scratch for your organisation. Things were added, adapted and worked around until the reporting stopped making sense and the spreadsheets started doing the heavy lifting.
Which brings me to the question I always ask early on:
“If you were designing your finance system from scratch today — would it look the same?”
If the answer is no (and it usually is), the conversation worth having isn’t about software. It’s about what’s stopping the change.
That’s normally where we start.
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If you’re a Students’ Union or Not for Profit organisation, we can help design your digital finance transformation programme, please get in touch for an initial no obligation consultation.