Today, 70-90% of financial processes can be automated, significantly reducing manual “tape” work and errors. Opting for “paperless” enables finance staff and accountants to focus on important other aspects of the business such as financial planning, forecasting and simulations, budgeting, control, collaboration with management / owners and providing them with insights based on smart dashboards and KPIs.
I see 3 major target groups in the SME market
- Accounting firms: who want to process their customers' invoices, expense reports, VAT returns and annual reports in a fast, automated and transparent manner and present easy-to-understand financial / management reports to their customers.
- Small SMEs & Sole Proprietorships: who mainly want to focus on their substantive work. They outsource everything to an accounting firm and want tools to easily register purchase invoices and expense reports, create sales invoices, send them to customers, track payments and send reminders. And finally, they want their accountant to always have all the information / documents available.
- Medium to large companies: who do their own accounting. They need tools to create sales orders, capture, approve, record, and archive sales invoices and expense reports, and want easy-to-use financial dashboards to track the company's financial KPIs.
It's great to see soo many start-ups and scale-ups with powerful SaaS cloud-based tools, when combined, get them a powerful ecosystem to support the business!
Popular tools in the Benelux are:
- Exact Online
- Blue 10
- One Archive / Unified Post
- EMAsphere
- Silverfin
- YUKI
- Xpenditure
- Teamleader
- CODAbox
- …
