A financial management system is the programs and processes used to manage an organization's revenues, expenses, and assets. In addition to supporting day-to-day financial operations, the purpose of a financial management system is to maximize profits and ensure the organization's long-term sustainability.
Financial management is the planning, organizing, directing and controlling the financial resources of an organisation. It includes things like maintaining the supply of funds, ensuring that shareholders get a good return on their investment, optimizing the use of funds, and investing the organization's funds in practical and safe opportunities.
Financial management is important to an organization because it helps in deciding how to obtain and distribute funds, make important financial decisions, improve profits, increase company value, and maintain financial stability of the business. In short, financial management is the core of every organization.
The financial management system handles all financial transactions within the company and keeps track of money as it enters and exits, as it is a program that an organization uses to display and manage its income, expenses and assets to maximize profits and ensure sustainability, and helps improve business performance in the short and long term.
Financial management software can be part of a company's enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, which integrates financial and operational data and provides teams with a comprehensive view of the business.
Standalone financial applications can also be combined to create a comprehensive financial management system.
Increasingly, financial managers are choosing cloud-based ERP and financial management software that can scale quickly to handle growth and provide functionality for diverse geographies, languages, currencies, and regulations.
Accounting is the process of recording, maintaining, and reporting a company's money and assets to demonstrate its financial position. On the contrary, financial management manages the economic activities of the organization to achieve financial goals and help management to take informed decisions.
Accounting focuses on reporting and financial management centers around high-level activities, such as how to generate cash, create wealth, use assets, and get good returns on investments.
A good financial management system will provide insight into how the business is doing and provide an understanding of why it is performing well (or not), and with a financial management system, you can make informed decisions and strategic plans, and it can help the company to be more profitable by showing what is happening within Business around major financial issues.
The system can also help your business be proactive rather than reactive, allow you to easily see your profit margins to see how goods or services are being priced, and help you monitor all costs so you can keep them low.
Arguably, financial management helps you plan for things like taxes and employee benefits, and analyzes cash flow so you can make sure you have enough cash on hand to buy inventory and pay bills.
Any organization that wants to expand its business operations by improving decision-making and financial performance needs a financial management system, the financial management system helps to make informed business forecasts, and if you want to grow your business financial management will help you to develop strategies to achieve your business goals while tracking income and expenses to help with financial planning.