Too many tools, not enough automation: How finance became a graveyard of SaaS

Siloed point solutions are just patching the cracks. It’s time for a platform-first strategy.

Your finance and accounting SaaS tools were supposed to make finance more efficient. Instead, they’ve created complexity, disconnected workflows and competing systems that are time-consuming and don’t talk to each other. You may have adopted reconciliation, journal entry and intercompany software, but none of them address the full scope of end-to-end automation. Instead, they create the need for additional automation tools and more manual effort.

It’s time to rethink the patchwork. Learn how a platform-first strategy solution like Finance Automation by Redwood offers something different: true automation that executes your accounting and finance functions, not just tracks them.

The trap of fixing problems one tool at a time

You likely didn’t set out to build a fragmented tech stack. But when you look at your finance automation tools today, do you see a streamlined process or a collection of isolated fixes?

This happens when teams search for a solution for a problem, not a solution to the problem. You need to automate account reconciliations, so you buy a tool. Then you add another tool or module for journal entries and additional automation tools for the unaddressed manual effort. It’s logical in the moment — but over time, it creates silos.

Instead of simplifying your financial close, this approach leads to disconnected systems, inconsistent validation and more complicated audits that require constant oversight.

According to the 2025 SSON R2R automation playbook, 76% of finance leaders say automation is critical to transformation, yet only 33% have strong executive support to scale it. The results? Projects stall. ROI suffers. And finance ends up stuck in a loop of disconnected tools that never quite deliver.

It’s a familiar pattern where good intentions lead to a pile of shelfware, disconnected workflows and a finance tech stack that resembles more of a SaaS graveyard than a unified strategy.

The SaaS graveyard: When financial point tools create more problems than they solve

Most SaaS tools promise to eliminate manual work. In reality, many just shift the burden elsewhere and require you to manage handoffs between them. You might use one system for reconciliations, another to validate journals and a third to execute SAP closing tasks. But without orchestration, you’re the one bridging the gaps.

SSON’s research highlights the disconnect: 81% of finance leaders believe journal entries are highly automatable, yet just 54% have made progress. Even more telling is that only 13% are satisfied with the ROI of their financial automation solutions.

So, what’s missing? Many of these tools were built for compliance, not execution. They track approvals or store documentation but don’t handle the actual work. They weren’t designed for seamless integration or built to automate end-to-end processes across the close. That’s what sets Finance Automation apart. The platform executes tasks inside your SAP systems and minimizes your reliance on separate systems to enable faster, more accurate decision-making and capacity release to support your business needs.

When tools don’t talk to each other, finance loses visibility

Each tool introduces a new data model, interface and set of permissions. You might reconcile account balances in one system, prepare reports in another and track their status in a standalone checklist. Meanwhile, your SAP contains the truth, but your dashboards aren’t in sync.

Disconnected tools create data silos and force your accounting and finance teams to align information manually across systems. This delays reporting, increases risk and undermines confidence in your numbers.

Finance Automation eliminates this fragmentation by embedding execution and validation inside your accounting and finance systems to provide a consistent, audit-ready view of every close task and its current status.

The longer you try to squeeze more value out of disconnected tools, the deeper your organization sinks into its own SaaS graveyard.

The costs you didn’t budget for

Task-level point solutions may seem cost-effective, but their hidden costs add up fast:

• Building and maintaining custom integrations
• Continuous onboarding and training across platforms
• Delays in processing time and misaligned dependencies
• Duplicate effort from manual data entry and rework
• Inconsistent data and risk exposure across disconnected systems

SSON’s 2025 data confirms it. 88% of organizations report moderate or lower satisfaction with their automation ROI. Fragmented tools are a major reason why. However, Finance Automation avoids this spiral by offering a scalable automation model — no per-user fees and no per-task charges — just unified, coordinated execution across your accounting and financial processes.

What a platform-first strategy really looks like

A true automation platform doesn’t just plug gaps. It optimizes how you run finance. Finance Automation unifies fragmented business processes across your people, processes and technology, encompassing the entire record-to-report (R2R) process, into one connected solution.

Here’s what that looks like in real time:

• Configurable controls to support multi-entity, multi-region finance teams
• Coordinated, rules-based workflows that link one step to the next
• Live views that show current status, bottlenecks and ownership
• Native SAP execution
• One shared data model for financial operations, tasks and compliance records

Instead of managing work, Finance Automation completes it. Instead of tracking outcomes, it delivers them.

Move from tactical fixes to strategic execution

Some accounting and finance teams confuse adoption with impact. If your automation is still dependent on people to push it forward by having them launch jobs, confirm steps and update dashboards, you’re still running the process manually. You’ve just added more interfaces.

Finance Automation takes a different approach. It removes manual intervention by design. The platform handles execution in SAP, tracks validation and results automatically and empowers your team to focus on what matters: analysis, strategy and making faster, smarter strategic decisions.

Instead of plugging gaps with more tools, Finance Automation helps you orchestrate your tech stack across people and processes to streamline your R2R operations with consistency and clarity.

Ready to push beyond the SaaS graveyard?

If your tech stack is full of disconnected financial and accounting software and your results still depend on manual processes, it’s time for a new approach. Finance Automation’s platform-first strategy gives you the execution power and scalability that task-level point tools can’t.

Instead of reacting to inefficiencies, you can start removing them. Instead of working around delays, you can eliminate them. And instead of managing a graveyard of SaaS, you can finally build the foundation for modern, connected finance.

Curious what your tech stack is really costing you? Explore the ROI of an end-to-end finance automation platform built to scale.