Adopting technology will open doors for growth and productivity within SMEs, says PKF’s Nicole Rousseau.
This year’s Finance Indaba gave SME owners in the finance industry skills and tools to advance their businesses through digitisation. A session titled, “Digital acceleration: how technology will open doors for growth,” expanded on how a cloud system can benefit a business’s growth.
A compelling presentation, led by Nicole Rousseau, PKF Ignite’s CFO, covered how cloud systems like Xero could potentially save companies time and money involved with processing accounts and security.
Finance indaba attendees learnt that Xero has the ability to connect small business owners with their banks and advisors on the app. Nicole added that Xero was also able to cover the increasing demands of SMEs by maintaining agility.
She noted that technology was key, and a cloud system was necessary to keep information on insights, trends, and company history to create value for their SMEs.
Nicole explained that Xero had the ability to unlock value by intelligently automating processes like consolidation, to detect anomalies and make recommendations that help with forecasting.
“Digitalisation will give the financial team time to focus on the important stuff, because the app provides results of figures in a timely manner, removing the process of having to wait for the CFO to release the figures at the end of the month. It gives you time to really see what your cash flow position is, and whether you’re going to run into problems,” she said.
“The only way to achieve productivity and efficiency is by digitising. There's no other way to make good business decisions and have up-to-date information. This is just accurate information into the cloud and it’s in real-time, you can log in on your mobile – doesn't matter how big your company is – and you can be able to actually see what’s going on,” she said.
Nicole told delegates that digitalisation helps businesses achieve data success, which helps them become efficient and more productive, which in turn helps the company to be more profitable.
App downtime
Nicole said Xero was a better solution for accounting problems as it has a 99.98 percent uptime, meaning it was always working and ensuring the safety of company information.
“Your data is saved and hosted on global enterprise places variously worldwide. There are no issues with your data security – it can’t be hacked, and they’ve got two-factor authentication for the users,” she said.
Nicole cited that Xero is also the first provider to have a direct connection with banks, or API direct ventilate. She mentioned that they are the first accounting provider to connect with E-filing.
