Built for growth: Turning financial complexity into strategic advantage
Unit4 back-office research 2025
Turning financial complexity into strategic advantage. Unit4 back-office research 2025.
Cash flow
Project financials
Year-end financial reporting
What can businesses do?
Financial complexity post-M&A
Conclusion
How Unit4 helps
Professional services is growing fast, merging often, and facing more financial complexity than ever. Disconnected financial systems, manual processes, and post-M&A integration headaches are slowing progress and eating up valuable time in the finance and IT teams.
But there’s good news: with the right investment in scalable, integrated financial management, these challenges become opportunities. Opportunities to gain clarity, drive efficiency, and free up your teams to focus on what really matters — strategic decision-making and business growth.
In this eBook — using data from 600 senior finance and IT decision makers within the professional services sector — we explore the financial realities holding organizations back and outline how to build a future-ready finance function that supports growth, agility, and resilience.
Only 46% of cash flow management is automated currently, with similar proportions still relying on MS Excel.
44 hours (or more than 1 FT employee’s time) spent per week across the finance team, on average, consolidating and correcting discrepancies in project financials.
73% lack a single source of truth for their financial data.
Senior finance decision makers spend 2 days per week, on average, consolidating financials in the run up to year-end.
61% of respondents felt like the additional strain of year-end reporting negatively impacts the wellbeing of their finance team.
1 in 5 organizations took longer than 1 year to integrate company systems post-merger or acquisition, longer than anticipated for 86%.
