There’s an ancient parable about a group of blind men encountering an elephant for the first time.
Each one touches a different part of the animal and draws wildly different conclusions. One, feeling the trunk, declares it’s a snake. Another, holding the leg, insists it’s a tree. A third, gripping the tail, is sure it’s a rope.
Each has part of the truth, but none has the full picture.
For many businesses, their finances are just like this.
In my recent articles, I’ve explored what it takes to plan financially for 2025. To build a strong strategy for the future, you need to understand your current financial situation in depth. You can’t decide what to change, keep, drop, or improve until you have clarity about where you stand today.
Most businesses already have plenty of financial information to gain this clarity.
The problem is that this “internal intelligence” is often scattered across different systems: your CRM, stock management dashboard, payroll, customer or membership systems, specialist tools, and of course your accounting platform.
When these systems don’t talk to each other, it becomes almost impossible to connect the dots.
It’s like being one of those blind men: you have isolated pieces of information but no way to get the full picture. Worse, you might even draw the wrong conclusions about your finances – because you’re only seeing snippets of the available information.
One business we worked with initially thought their cash flow was healthy because they were tracking income from one revenue stream. But another system revealed mounting unpaid invoices they’d completely overlooked.
Without an integrated view of their finances, they didn’t realise they were heading towards a serious cash crunch.
Situations like this often arise when businesses rely on a mix of legacy systems, purchased at different times by different people, without considering how they connect to one another.
The good news is that modern technology solves this problem. Today’s systems are designed to integrate seamlessly, allowing you to unify your data and gain the clarity you need.
Our iplicit accounting platform, for example, is built to integrate easily with other tools. Its user-friendly API integration suite makes connecting your systems simple, even without technical expertise.
When your systems work together, you’ll gain a clearer picture of your finances, enabling you to spot opportunities and risks and plan more effectively for the year ahead.
The benefits don’t stop there. Integrated systems also make it easier to identify missing or incomplete information, giving you even better insights into your financial situation moving forward.
Finally, streamlined systems significantly improve efficiency.
Take one of our clients as an example. Before working with us, they raised dozens of sales invoices daily in their CRM system and then manually transferred them to their accounting software.
Now, the integration we set up ensures invoices and receipts flow automatically between the two systems.
They’ve saved countless hours each week, freeing their team to focus on more valuable work.
If your financial systems aren’t integrated, now is the time to act. Unifying your data won’t just make planning for 2025 easier – it will give you financial clarity throughout the year, helping you make better decisions every single day.
If that’s something you need help with, why not get in touch with us today? We’ve helped dozens of businesses streamline their financial systems, get accurate, timely, and useful financial information, and use that information to grow faster and maximise their profit. We’d love to do the same for you.
Simply email garry@insightassociates.co.uk or call us on 01279 647 447, and let’s discuss how we can help.
Warmly,
Garry