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Finance

Strong financial systems are essential for building a resilient, well-governed business. As your organisation grows, finance solutions play a critical role in unifying financial data, streamlining processes such as accounting, forecasting, and reporting, and enabling more confident, data-driven decision-making. Whether delivered as standalone platforms or part of a broader technology stack, these tools help drive accuracy, efficiency, and financial transparency across the business.

Finance systems may a part of wider ERP Solution.

Finance solutions

Finance solutions

Finance solutions typically support a wide range of essential business functions, including:

  • General ledger and core accounting
  • Accounts payable and receivable
  • Cash flow and treasury management
  • Fixed asset management
  • Budgeting and forecasting
  • Financial consolidation and reporting
  • Tax management and compliance
  • Financial planning and analysis (FP&A)
  • Revenue recognition and adherence to UK GAAP and IFRS (eg IFRS 15)

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Finance systems are commonly delivered via SaaS platforms, but solutions can also be tailored to meet specific business and regulatory requirements through:

  • On-premise financial implementations
  • Cloud-hosted or hybrid deployments
  • Integration with existing legacy finance systems

We support a wide range of financial ERP solutions, including: HANA Finance, Oracle Fusion Financials, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, Sage Inctacct, Netsuite, Infor CloudSuite Financials, Access Dimensions.

Licensing terms for finance modules often involve tiered access based on user roles (e.g., controller, analyst, auditor), requiring careful alignment with your internal processes. Many solutions involve complex tiered pricing or modular bundling, which can be difficult to unwind once implemented.

We advise on:

  • SaaS and perpetual licence terms
  • Cloud hosting and SLAs for critical financial data
  • Financial reporting and audit-readiness obligations
  • IP ownership in tailored forecasting or reporting templates
  • Post-Brexit and multi-jurisdictional compliance structures

Where third-party implementation partners are involved, we assist with:

  • Scoping, blueprinting and build phases
  • Financial data migration and reconciliation risks
  • Regulatory reporting requirements (e.g. UK Corporate Governance Code)
  • Integration with banking APIs and legacy systems

Key concerns you may not have considered:

Audit trails and financial data integrity

Maintaining accurate, tamper-proof audit trails is essential for regulatory compliance and robust internal controls. Finance solutions must ensure that all transactions are fully traceable, properly validated, and securely stored to support both internal audits and external investigations.

Segregation of duties and access controls

Proper role-based access controls and separation of duties are critical to preventing fraud and ensuring financial accountability. Finance systems should be configured to avoid conflicting responsibilities—for example, ensuring that the same individual cannot both approve and process payments.

Business continuity and financial system

Financial systems must be resilient to outages, cyber threats, and operational disruptions. Robust backup procedures, disaster recovery measures, and business continuity planning are essential to ensure uninterrupted financial operations and timely reporting during periods of crisis.

Custom reporting tools and IP ownership

Businesses often develop tailored reports, dashboards, and financial models within their finance systems. It is important to clearly define ownership of the intellectual property in these tools—particularly when they are created by external consultants or implementation partners.

Finance system implementation support

  • Selecting the right solution requires:

    Determining your requirements (all your required business functions and gaps in existing systems). These should be categorised as:

    • Essential
    • Future essential
    • Desirable
    • Nice to have

    Assessing potential systems against those requirements and in particular assessing whether they are met:

    • Out of the box
    • Through configuration
    • Through development
    • Through integration with a third-party solution

    We are often brought into negotiations with a supplier after this has been finalised, yet we can add significant value at this stage, not least by controlling the “terms and conditions” that will apply at contract award. 

  • Necessary for larger implementations

    This is the first activity with the selected supplier, which sets the expectations between the parties. The aim is to gain as much specificity as possible, acknowledging that the detailed design phase goes to a much greater level.  

    Key issues are:

    • To ensure the scope ties back to the requirements. See Specification vs requirements
    • Identify and document any agreed “gaps” against the original requirements (as time moves on and requirements change)
    • Confirming what is out of the box vs through configuration vs through development vs through integration with a third-party solution
    • This can and should form part of the main contract, but we do often see this phase started in haste without the right contractual protection. It is possible to pull it back under the wider arrangement, but this can be difficult
  • Detailed design is where the design of the new system is finalised. This essentially covers the contents of blueprinting/scoping, but to a much greater depth, enabling both parties to be able to understand their respective obligations.

    It is important to see a detailed and comprehensive RACI matrix (Responsible/ Accountable/ Consulted/ Informed). 

    A very common area of dispute comes from a lack of understanding on the part of the customer as to its obligations and “over-optimism” on the part of the implementer in this respect. 

  • This is where the solution is configured and developed (as applicable) in accordance with the detailed design. 

    This may include developing custom modules, integrating with existing systems, and configuring the system to meet specific business requirements. 

  • Once built, the solution needs to be implemented. This involves deploying the new system, migrating data from existing systems, and training users on the new system. 

    It is crucial to have a well-defined plan for data migration and user training to ensure a smooth transition. 

  • There are differing elements to testing, whether (for example): 

    • Functional testing
    • Load testing
    • Penetration testing
    • User acceptance testing 

    It is important, yet often overlooked, to ensure that:

    • It is clear which party is responsible for which elements
    • How the acceptance criteria are to be set
    • How testing will take place
    • How achievement is determined
    • What happens if there is a failure

    Following successful acceptance testing, a date is agreed for go-live.

  • Necessary for larger implementations

    This is a short period of support immediately after go-live where typically the original team who built and implemented the solution remain on the project to monitor and deal with issues. 

    We work with clients to ensure hypercare runs for an appropriate period of time, that the right people are made available for hypercare and that appropriate response and resolution targets are applied, together with appropriate consequences for any failures. 

  • Life isn’t perfect and systems never quite run perfectly!

    Ongoing managed support is therefore an important part of the contracting process.

    See IT services 

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