5 Reasons to Migrate from a Legacy System

Prioritise integration to future-proof your organisation

Historically, legacy systems have been installed on-premise, taking up floor space and demanding attention. Legacy systems are near-impossible to integrate with other platforms needed in modern business, meaning that scaling them to meet the needs of an evolving organisation proves extremely challenging. The organisation must then compromise excessively on what it truly requires.

One of the main benefits of migrating from a legacy system to cloud-based accounting software is the integration and scalability opportunities. As your business grows into the mid-market, so does the need to manage larger transactional volumes and data consolidation. Legacy systems simply cannot support such complexities.

Implementing accounting software, however, allows you to integrate your current systems into a singular cohesive system, which acts as a communication hub for your data. This interconnects data across Excel spreadsheets, HR and CRM systems, among others. As a result, duplications in data input and task completion are reduced, and business-wide efficiency increases.

With ready-to-go native integrations or more specialised bespoke integrations, Xledger can flex to meet your business needs, while complying with industry standards. For example, our intrinsic banking infrastructure ensures smooth transactional data flow between your bank and Xledger without jumping between systems.

Unlike legacy systems, our suite of feature-rich APIs integrates seamlessly with other applications, such as Zapier, Azure, and Power BI, to suit your specific business requirements. Software that is built for cloud-based accounting future-proofs your business operations. It is a worthy investment and opens the door to greater expansion capabilities as the world moves towards cloud-based storage.

Cut back maintenance costs and gain instant updates

Is your current legacy system starting to look like a cash cow? Are you needing more and more add-ons to access basic functionality? Multi-tenant public cloud accounting software is the solution, providing finance departments and key stakeholders with configurable dashboards and functionality that suit your organisation’s requirements.

Alongside the need for costly IT servers, personnel, and general maintenance, there is no active investment in legacy systems. After each purchase of more server space and more system updates, your investment becomes a depreciating asset.

Multi-tenant cloud-based accounting software greatly reduces these operational and financial costs. Updates are rolled out automatically to every Xledger user; there are no hidden numbers.

As a privately owned software company, with no debt and no stakeholders to appease, we simply invest our time into research and development. But what does this mean for your business? It means you receive seamless upgrades and bug fixes at no extra cost, ensuring that 100% of Xledger customers are on the latest version of our software.

Add value by automating manual processes

Freeing your finance experts from frustrating manual labour is the best way to add value to your financial operations. Automated finance software benefits businesses growing in complexity; in-built automated data entry functions ensure that complex internal processes are completed with minimal manual input.

Gone are the days when finance experts spent weeks manually pulling data from Excel sheets and various disconnected legacy systems to create outdated consolidated reports. Instead, reporting and forecasting takes a few clicks and gives an accurate picture of the numbers at the time they are pulled together.

Automated Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and bank reconciliation gives finance experts more time to analyse transactional data rather than simply perform functional tasks. As a result, your finance team can better inform key stakeholders with operational decision-making, and offer more visibility into expenditure, cost allocation, and cash flow forecasting.

Implementing automated accounting software creates a unified hub where you can view and process bank transactions. Not only does this eliminate your organisation’s need for traditional online banking, but it also consolidates and presents expenditure in definable dimensions. Thanks to automation, there’s no need to jump between multiple systems. Comprehensive budgeting capability, rapid bank reconciliation, and oversight dashboards with real-time data are centralised and ready to use.

Stay compliant and secure on true-cloud software

Data security is another important aspect of accounting, particularly as the market transitions from on-premise to cloud-based storage. Every organisation must determine the appropriate data security framework for their business to ensure they remain compliant and adhere to industry regulations.

Unfortunately, legacy systems lack the built-in infrastructure needed to support modern regulations. The systems are not cloud-native and are often retrofitted to operate on the cloud. In doing so, vendors have to compromise on functionality. Without advanced encryption and security protocols, legacy systems increase your organisation’s risk of cyber attacks.

On the other hand, software like Xledger which is born in the cloud, and native to the cloud, does not compromise functionality. Cloud-native software contains in-built features like automated governance processes that help you align your security to industry-accredited frameworks, such as ISO 27001. This ensures your data is stored in a secure, true-cloud database, accessible only to you and your appropriate employees.

Xledger adheres to ISO 27001 which, as part of the ISO family, is developed by over 800 technical bodies across 174 countries. In other words, your security is a top priority.

Access expert consultants to streamline your accounting processes

Legacy systems come with a high price tag and not much else. Strategically partnering with an accounting software provider such as Xledger gives you access to an array of user support experts, and who better to implement new accounting software than expert accountants?

100% of our consultants are accountancy-trained and collectively bring 280 years of industry experience to implementation projects.

All our UK employees are based in our Bristol office—from implementation consultants throughout the integration process to a team of support consultants post-Go-Live, organisations feel cared for with Xledger. This is proven by our 97%* Customer Support Satisfaction score and positive customer feedback across multiple sectors.

Actively upskilling internal and external finance experts is key to driving accounting processes into the future. Our learning resource platform Equip counts towards CPD points so your finance teams can continually develop their knowledge of best industry practices. Essentially, our experts train your experts on how to efficiently report, analyse, and present data through Xledger’s accounting software while staying compliant.

Next steps

If any of these reasons resonate with you and your organisation, get in touch with our team and take the next steps to migrate from a legacy system to a cloud-native accounting software.