Season 3, Episode 4 : Business Central: An Investment or a Cost?

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As a finance leader, giving the go ahead on a project that results in a loss of money, wasted resources, and yields little benefit to the company is probably one of your biggest fears. That’s why you need all the facts and need to be able to understand the impacts the project will have on your organisation. Previously in this series we’ve discussed how Business Central can enable you to get the relevant metrics you need to drive business success and improve the operability of your organisation. But even implementing Business Central is a project and has a price tag. So, is it an investment or just another cost? I’m Laura at Creative and this is Dynamics Unwrapped…

So typically, Business Central has a payback period of less than a year and an ROI of 172% over a three-year period which is pretty good considering you’ll most likely use it for 8 to 10 years especially given how scalable the system is.

But it’s all good and well me throwing numbers at you, but how does it actually do this? Well, one of the first reasons is the reduction in required finance and operations staff hires. It’s difficult as it is to hire talent, but when you’re a growing organisation and you’re limited by disparate ERP tools, you will inevitably have to hire more people. However, Business Central connects and centralises processes, automates tasks like invoicing and billing, and with power automate, workflows can be as automated as necessary, which means that employees can be more effective within their same working hours and reduces the significant cost of hiring as your business scales.

Another reason why Business Central has a 12% ROI is that it improves the flow of operations. Employees can gain visibility into the operations across the organisation, and this coupled with automation, and increased ERP access across multiple devices, can lead to improved productivity and allow them to focus their attention on other initiatives to further increase the effectiveness of key processes. Features like inventory tracking to increase speed, more accurate reporting to decrease rework activity, production lifecycle planning and tracking to streamline operations, and interactivity with excel to save time are all examples of how Business Central can improve the effectiveness of your finance and operations to ensure you get a return on your investment.  

Other ways in which you can achieve an ROI with Business Central is through its integrations with other Microsoft products, increased confidence from real-time visibility, and the flexibility provided by being on the cloud.  

So, like any project Business Central has a cost, but we like to see it as more of an investment as it streamlines processes, increases productivity, and saves costs. Of course, there are other factors that will determine the success of the project, but done right, you could be making money by implementing Business Central.  

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