Manually entering financial data into your Oracle Cloud ERP system is challenging, especially if the information entered is incorrect and proves costly for the firm. Luckily, there are solutions available that automate the tedious nature of financial processes for the better.
The overreliance on manual processes is what confused Lily Mazieres, a More4apps Oracle specialist. If so many important processes and reports rely on manually processed data in your ERP system, there is unnecessary space for error.
“It can be very difficult,” Mazieres explained. “Especially when you’re doing lots of things manually and you don’t have the right tools to help. Before joining More4apps, I didn’t realise how many tasks were done manually in finance. It’s not really a great way to spend your day! The end-of-month or end-of-year experience is already stressful; you don’t want to undergo manual tasks at a time like this.”
Despite many financial firms suffering from human error, it was a simple realisation that triggered inspiration for the Finance Module. How could the job of manual processing be made any easier?
“It’s basically an Excel add-on,” Mazieres simply said. “Within Excel, people can connect to Oracle and get data in and out of the ERP. It sounds very simple, but this kind of end user solution was missing in most Oracle Financial areas, before More4apps came in.”
More4apps operates within the Oracle framework, providing secure, Excel-based solutions. Built-in validation, alongside Oracle Fusion Cloud’s error messaging, means users can quickly identify a problem and resolve it without too much effort, allowing for a more agile and adaptive approach to achieving resolution.
“What we hear most people complain about is the amount of data they need to process manually. They are under a lot of pressure from the organisation, and the data loading solutions that Oracle provides are not user-oriented” Mazieres said, expanding on the mental duress that could induce errors during financial processes.
Streamlining any Excel experience is the way to improve the user experience according to More4apps. A tool like the Finance Module removes the need for tedious data entry, and further customizations of the Excel spreadsheet can make financial processing easier to undergo.
In the More4apps Finance Module, Mazieres found that many workers were taken with the flexibility of the template. “People typically like to copy and paste data between an external report and the More4apps template, and it’s super easy to do that. Using More4apps templates, users can move columns around, add their own columns, have cut-down layouts and the data records being uploaded are all on a single worksheet in a hierarchical manner making visibility of their upload so simple.
“We realized that often users purchase our products to solve a particular pain point, usually to do with data entry being too time-consuming. They soon discover the Integrators can be useful for many more of their processes and adopt these to improve accuracy and timeliness.”
Ultimately, while financial analytics can help a firm make the right investment choices, it’s the seemingly simple solutions that can improve the end user experience. A financial solution that integrates with Excel is specifically designed to make data entry painless – there’s no need to rely on manual processing of your ERP data anymore. The time saved can be better spent on more innovative work.
