5 reasons to integrate your maintenance and ERP accounting systems

Written By: Larry McLennan, VP of Professional Services, on Jan 14, 2018

Why should you integrate your business systems to your maintenance software?

1. Give your accounting team visibility into maintenance costs in real-time.

A maintenance / ERP accounting system integration improves visibility as well as the timeliness of information and brings updates from the maintenance department to accounting in real-time. It allows the accounting team to view, analyze, and report on purchase information from an accounting system perspective, so they are not forced to context-switch between the maintenance and accounting environment. With this integration, accounting can see work that is in process, parts ordered, and service requests that have been delivered but not invoiced yet. This allows the accounting team to become aware of accruals as soon as invoices are delivered, allowing them to increase the velocity of payments.

2. Improve the accuracy and efficiency of your purchase order information by reducing double data entry.

When purchase orders are reviewed, approved, and matched against the invoice, automation helps to reduce errors in the system by creating a single stream of data. Automating the flow of data between systems will save time and increase efficiencies by bypassing manual entry a second time.

3. Reconcile invoices from the maintenance environment to identify quality issues.

It often makes sense to allow the maintenance team to handle the reconciliation and matching of invoices since they originally created the purchase orders and are therefore in the best position to determine whether the parts or services were really delivered to the standard they requested.

4. Quickly create purchase requests without knowing the supplier, then fix it retrospectively.

The maintenance /accounting integration also empowers the accounting team with a control point to manage and create vendors from the accounting system, so that when new vendors and suppliers are added they can be automatically pushed to the maintenance system. The maintenance road call people are having to deal with new vendors and suppliers on a regular basis, but cannot always wait for suppliers to be added and pushed to the maintenance system by the accounting people. This integration allows users to add suppliers that do not exist in the system so that if a breakdown occurs in the middle of the night and there are no accounting people available to create the new vendor in the application, the technician can still get work done. Then, supplier data can be resolved from an accounting perspective after the fact.

5. Improve your relationship with suppliers to secure preferential pricing.

A side benefit of the maintenance / ERP Accounting system integration is that when you decrease the lag time between the initial invoice and payment to the supplier, it gives you extra leverage for negotiation with the supplier on your rates and pricing. By ensuring the maintenance system data is automated to feed to accounts payable in the ERP system, you can create the fastest possible turnaround when paying supplier invoices.