Finance and accounting software is the software a company's finance department uses to pay its suppliers, bill its customers, close its books each month, pay its taxes and keep the record that it did all of this properly. Its users are the accounts team, the purchasing team, the tax team and the company secretary. Its buyers are the chief financial officer (CFO) and the finance teams of companies of every size.
Consider a 900-person company in Nashik that makes mixer grinders and pressure cookers. Every month, it buys steel, motors and packaging from about 150 suppliers. It sells to distributors across India, and it also sells an extended-care plan to households by monthly subscription. At the end of the month, it must check every rupee, work out its GST and report to its board. Each of these jobs is done by a different kind of software.
The first zone is procurement, which means buying for the company. Procure-to-pay software runs the chain from finding a supplier to paying its invoice. Telecom and technology expense management checks what the company already pays for, such as phone lines and data feeds. The payment itself is made through accounts payable (AP) automation, which is covered under spend management.
The second zone is financial close and tax. Financial close and reconciliation software matches every bank line to the company's ledger, its own record of every amount paid and received. Financial planning and analysis (FP&A) software builds the budget and the forecast. Tax software, such as GST reconciliation, works out what the company owes the government and what credit it can claim.
The third zone is corporate governance. It holds the board portal, through which directors receive their papers and approve the minutes, and the quality management system (QMS), which shows auditors that the factory followed its rules.
One product sits beside the three zones: subscription billing. It bills customers who pay every month, such as the households on the extended-care plan. It is the only product here about money coming in. A one-off sale to a distributor is invoiced in the ERP, the company's main accounting system.
Most of this software is SaaS, rented over the internet by the month or the year. Its work follows three chains that finance teams name by their initials: procure-to-pay (P2P), order-to-cash (O2C) and record-to-report (R2R). The page on P2P, O2C and R2R processes explains them. More and more of the checking in each chain is now done by AI models, and a person approves the result. This way of working is called human in the loop.
India matters to this industry in two ways. Many of the world's largest finance software companies build their products in Bengaluru, Pune, Delhi and Chennai. And India's GST created a tax software industry of its own.