[devjab]

The systems aren’t build to handle the real world. The issue isn’t really technical though, at least not in my opinion. We manage a lot of companies in a lot of different countries and the best fit for us was Microsoft’s BC365, which is frankly still a horrible fit. The issues are mainly related to legislation though, and I’m not sure how you could really plan on disrupting that part of company management even if you wanted to.

[pintxo]

Is it because the systems are mostly designed on the 80/90 and are just outdated?

I guess you’d have to provide a solid reason for mgmt to invest into something new. So increased UX won’t cut it. AI/automation might, given that we potentially face massive shortages of admin people, looking at western societies. But it’s hard to see a path into companies to even start with this.

[devjab]

I think it’s mainly because of the myriad of rules and laws surrounding budgeting. Like, we’re using BC365 right, but we’re also paying a 3rd party consultant to build some custom APIs into BC365 for us because the laws needed to “manage” Danish companies require more features than BC365 provides. SAP would be able to handle some of those better, but SAP is sort of this thing that takes over the way you do ERP. And it’s still not really build to handle our use case of managing many companies in many different countries.

There is also the issue of how you’d likely want payment systems to integrate with your ERP system in the year 2023. But payment systems are two separate things, one deals with banking and managing bank accounts and one deals with the transfer of payments. You’d think they should all be just one system, I do, but the rules and laws are so complex that they are 3 because you can have an entire enterprise sized company specialise in just one of those areas due to the complexity of the laws. I’ll give you one example, in Italy every “bill” (sorry I don’t know the English word for faktura”) has to pass through a national registry. This is mafia prevention, and frankly a rather good idea. It also means that a budget system in Italy needs functionality to handle the flow of obtaining SDI approval (the Italian thing). And that’s just one small tip of the iceberg of complexity you’re dealing with.

Automation is a whole other topic. That is probably ripe for disruption, but it’s already been sort of disrupted by Robot Process Automation. Which again has its own sets or issues, because some of the actions that you would like to automate can’t be. I forget which EU country made it illegal to approve payments automatically, but ideally you’d like automation on the outgoing payments of the transactions you’ve already got approved on your books. But then you can in most countries and not in others because of the law. Sometimes there is also the need for physical two-factor verification to log into things. In Denmark your systems can’t log into company bank accounts unless you build a robot to press a button and read a number on a little IOT device.