3 Trends You Need to Know Before You Purchase Finance Software in 2025

You might not need to use those advanced features right now. Perhaps having them today would feel like using an industrial strength power drill where a B&Q drill might suffice. 

But you’re probably going to be holding onto that finance software for a while – and tomorrow, next month, a year down the line, you might find yourself wishing that past-you had looked around for tools with next generation automation, or scaled to meet your organisations new and emerging challenges.

Take it from us. We’re accountants ourselves, and we know personally how frustrating it is to be stuck with accounting software that’s behind the times.

If you’re not holding onto your new finance software for at least five to seven years, it’s because someone missed something. Someone made a purchasing choice that left you without enough room to grow, or enough speed to keep pace with the market.

Of course, that’s not you, because you’re doing critical research like reading this article right here. You’re going to know what’s ahead. So here’s what 2025 and beyond holds for the best finance software: 

AI is here (and also not quite here yet)

AI has arrived in the finance world, with a level of new possibility hype that probably hasn’t been seen since the smartphone first landed in our pockets.

As of early 2025, though, a lot of AI-talk in the financial software industry is only talk of possibilities – not tested use cases.

We’re also waiting on regulatory bodies to make their decisions on AI accounting, but they’re likely to wait until they see an AI accounting product in the wild so they understand what it is they’re regulating. 

Early use cases will probably include automated recommendations for a human to verify the outputs of. Eventually, there will be ways for traditional robot process automation to make the checks.

As UIPath’s CEO Daniel Dines said in a keynote speech in 2024, you might have an AI agent that proposes travel itineraries and, once it’s trusted, you might give it the ability to book low-cost trips. But you need guard rails in place.

For tasks where errors or bias would be catastrophic (e.g. financial forecasts) you’re unlikely to hand it over to an AI Agent anytime soon. 

But in accounting tasks where errors are already common, it makes more sense to slowly introduce AI capabilities alongside the OCR and RPA abilities already in software like Xledger. 

According to Gartner, one-third of accountants say they make “at least a few” errors every week because they’re overly stretched. So if AI Agents can make a similar number of errors but enable accountants to catch their breath – and therefore catch those errors in time – it will have been worth it.

Open banking is more secure and building momentum

Although it’s been around ever since the birth of PSD2 in 2018, open banking is still very much a 2025 conversation.

The FCA noted 2024 brought significant open banking progress in fraud analysis capabilities, consumer protections and variable recurring payments – and this is making it all the more popular. According to Open Banking Limited, there are 11.7 million active users of open banking-enabled products in the UK, with 22.1 million monthly payments. 

Open banking gives you the power to link financial software straight to your bank account – and the number of banks saying yes to this arrangement is growing (at Xledger we can connect to 60+ banks in the UK right now).

When it comes to reconciliation, this is a godsend (or at least a UK Government-send). Accountants like us can now keep track of bank statements and cash flow in real time using the financial management tools in our software.

It’s also a miracle for scheduled and batch payments. With open banking functionality, accounting software can now simplify approvals, and set up new and recurring payments from the application, and without having to login to a bank to approve the transaction.

As one management accountant put it after using our software: “Now, our payments take less than 30mins. It was 2 days before…”

E-invoicing is on your doorstep (more accurately, in your portal)

E-invoicing is making digital invoicing look like child’s play in 2025. Public entities like the NHS are mandated to use e-invoicing, but almost every company, and certainly every mid-market company should be jumping on it by now.

Once we may have been glad that most of our invoices were arriving by email in PDF format, rather than arriving by post. But in 2025, this is becoming outdated and clunky – even if our financial software makes the best of it with OCR (optical character recognition) and other automated tools.

Crucially, compared to merely digital invoices, e-invoices don’t need to be checked by a human. 

And that’s all because they’re made of structured data files. So they can be sent from one company’s portal, arrive in a second company’s interface, and be automatically checked against the PO information, the Goods Received Note, with the data automatically updating the accounting software.

It’s a recipe for greater accuracy, fewer hassles with suppliers, and a much less frustrating user experience for anyone sorting out the VAT.

In fact it’s such a time saving that countries are enshrining e-invoicing into law.

 

On the 13th February 2025, HMRC launched a 12-week consultation on e-invoicing, and while it’s unlikely to inspire any official changes in 2025, it’s worth preparing now for what 2026 might hold.

With the EU and many other countries mandating e-invoices as the new default method, it’s absolutely essential that your financial software isn’t just ready for this change but leading the charge.

And if you’d like to learn more about our software, made by accountants for accountants, you can always book a demo or check out our article on three signs you’ve outgrown your finance system.