Finance departments collect a lot of data on customers and clients. They know, among other things, who these people are, how they pay, what they like to buy, and when they make their purchases. They also know the costs and buying habits of your production and operations teams.
In short, if you’re looking for business insights, plunging into your finance team’s data pools can do wonders for you and transform how your sales, marketing, operations and supply chains function and measure performance.
To truly leverage this data, you will need software that does not rely on manual processes. The best software allows collaboration across divisions/teams/geographies and this in turn allows data to be automatically updated from different sources. You will need a corporate performance management (CPM) tool which is scalable, flexible, and easy to use.
You need to transform your finance department using a tool like Adaptive Insights, moving it from a static bookkeeping team that operates in a silo to an active, insightful, and strategic collaborator that partners with other divisions in your business to help optimise your performance.
Can your manual processes keep up with changes in your data sources?
According to the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), if your finance division is still using Excel, recent research will make you give your go-to software a second thought.
The research shows that employees waste 75 percent of their time re-keying and manually rolling up data.
Perhaps more worrying, is the fact that 90 percent of spreadsheets contain data and formula errors and yet 90 percent of people are convinced that sheets are error-free, posing a significant risk to your business.
Since data is keyed in several times, and often manually, when sheets are shared with different teams and divisions, it’s difficult to track who entered or changed what data, and why.
As a result, there’s no single source of truth and it’s hard to trust the numbers when making rapid changes to plans.
In fact, such a financial system becomes a hindrance when adopting an agile mindset, which is critical to beating the competition.
In today’s disruptive business environment, it’s not just the finance team that needs data. Other divisions too need to use data, and they need it in a way they can understand.
According to Deloitte and the Wall Street Journal, visually representing data can amplify the impact of data-crunching efforts, which is why a picture is worth a thousand clicks.
The right solution is easy, powerful and fast
Businesses today have the opportunity to grow quickly, especially with lower barriers to market and increased reach via the internet. To be able to leverage that opportunity, businesses need a tool that’s easy to use and implement, powerful enough to be scalable and integrate with any number of data source systems and fast, enabling smarter more strategic decisions to be made.
Tom Bogan, CEO of Adaptive Insights, said: “There’s a lot more data available today. That changes the way companies plan.”
Bogan believes businesses must stop depending on spreadsheets in order to stay competitive and relevant.
He noted that in the past, companies would create a budget at the beginning of the year that would remain static. Today, however, the planning has become much more sophisticated.
“Continual updates create a richer plan. Planning frequency has gone from annual to monthly. It’s much more strategic.”
Spreadsheets will do the job, provided you’re willing to spend umpteen hours rebuilding models and tweaking data sets manually. Manual processes/multiple spreadsheets also make you vulnerable to human errors which might throw a spanner in the works of a high-growth business.
To keep up with shifting business needs, especially high-growth operations, scalability is key. You need flexible finance processes that allow you to collaborate with other users with ease. You need tools that enable you to build complex models and dashboards with a few clicks. Finally, you need processes that you can work with over the long-term, including periods of high growth or unprecedented change (such as an IPO).
Gear up for tomorrow’s opportunities by implementing a solution that is collaborative, comprehensive, and continuous. In fact, find one that’s cloud-based so it lets you tap into existing systems such as Salesforce and SAP to make integration into your workflow even smoother and better.