The complexity of leveraging ERP data often requires disproportionate effort from Finance teams.
SUMMARY
This article outlines the key challenges faced by corporate finance teams in mid-sized companies when trying to exploit ERP data.
We explore how these challenges affect not only the finance department but the broader organization.
Reading time: 2 minutes 45 seconds
Unlocking ERP financial data: three critical challenges to overcome
For mid-sized and larger companies, corporate finance teams increasingly need to extract and use ERP data for reporting, closing, and financial planning. Yet, finance departments often face significant hurdles in accessing, interpreting, and operationalizing ERP-sourced data. Ignoring these issues can lead to strategic errors, delays, and high costs. Identifying and resolving these barriers is crucial to professionalize finance and fully realize the value of ERP investments.
Challenge #1: Difficulty accessing relevant granular data
Most ERPs are built to optimize transactional operations—not to support corporate-level financial analysis. As a result, finance teams must navigate complex data structures, where relevant insights are buried across modules and tables. For example, key operational data (contracts, projects, inventory, HR) often isn’t easily accessible from the General Ledger (GL).
To address this, companies should implement specialized FP&A connectors designed to extract critical data beyond the GL—such as billing details, purchase orders, or project data. A robust solution will include prebuilt access modules tailored for finance, significantly simplifying access to the right data for analysis.
Challenge #2: Complexity in transforming data into usable insights
Even when ERP data is accessible, it is rarely in a format directly usable for financial reporting or planning. ERP data is operational in nature and typically requires enrichment: analytical regrouping, reclassification by accounting nature, multi-entity or multi-currency consolidation, etc.
To address this challenge, finance teams need smart transformation layers between the ERP and their financial models. This can include finance-specific data modeling tools, analytical cubes, or modern FP&A platforms that offer preconfigured, customizable data models designed for finance—accelerating and securing this critical transformation step.
Challenge #3: Lack of agility and over-dependence on IT
Finance teams often rely heavily on IT to extract or modify ERP data, which slows down projects and limits autonomy. This dependency can lead to frustration and hinders finance’s ability to act as an agile business partner.
PTo reduce this dependency, finance teams need secure self-service tools that allow them to explore, filter, and manipulate data without constantly involving IT. A purpose-built solution should include ready-to-use connectors, built-in permissions management, and complete user autonomy—while still complying with data governance standards.
Conclusion
Effectively leveraging ERP data is a strategic lever to improve the accuracy, agility, and speed of financial processes. To achieve this, finance teams must overcome the challenges of accessing granular data, transforming it into insights, and operating independently from IT. The FP&A SwiftFinance solution offers a comprehensive approach with prebuilt modules for extracting critical ERP data, ready-to-use financial models, and intuitive interfaces tailored to finance teams. It's an ideal platform to turn ERP data into a true competitive advantage.
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Leveraging ERP Data for Finance