Beyond best-of-breed: What’s next for your organization?

Maybe you found the idea compelling at the time. The best-of-breed model. Pick only the best applications in each functional category, then integrate them into one all-star system.

Maybe you had no say in the matter. You got hired on or promoted up, and now you’re responsible for the patchwork system your predecessor recommended.

Maybe it served your organization well for a time. But by now, the costs are starting to add up. Executives demand more insight than you can reliably deliver. The accounting cycle remains long and wasteful. And it’s becoming painfully apparent that your current system can’t support your organization’s growth.

So where should you go next?

You will have two significant choices to make:

1. Stay or go.

The issue here is not whether you can make your current system work. Can you afford to make it work? Is it worth the cost (in time, labor, resources, and missed opportunities)? More importantly, what could you gain or save (in efficiency, effectiveness, and savings) from breaking with your status quo?

2. Stick with best-of-breed or consider alternative models.

We’ve written extensively on the relative strengths and weaknesses of each model¹. In short, best-of-breed systems allow you slightly greater freedom to assemble and tailor your system. However, their maintenance costs tend to balloon over time, and the difficulties of both establishing and sustaining the integrations that hold them together often exceed estimates.

By one study, integrated applications can cost 700% of their initial licensing expenses over three years.

The downsides continue. A build-your-own solution is only as strong as its weakest integration. Multiple providers, programming languages, and products make for complex IT architecture. Each application comes with its own requirements and update schedule.

By contrast, unified solutions provide greater security and longevity, more reliable data transfer, and lower lifetime TCO.

A group of colleagues sit around a table in a meeting, with one person standing and pointing at a laptop screen while others review documents and take notes.

Xledger empowers 10,000+ customers in 50+ countries with the market’s most automated and unified finance management solution. Delivered via the true, multi-tenant cloud, Xledger enjoys recommendations from PwC, KPMG, and BDO. Our radically personalized customer service has earned us an industry-leading lifetime customer retention rate: we’ve retained 98% of all customers since 2000.

Want to learn more about Xledger? Don’t hesitate to get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.

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