How does your business track its financial data? Larger companies may have a separate division in their finance department that manages and interprets this data. For smaller to mid-sized organizations, the CFO may perform these tasks, or they may use a specific software to analyze the data.
Whatever method your organization uses to track and manage your financial data, often the main goal is to measure results to better inform your business strategy. By doing so, you’re investing your resources in a growing business trend commonly referred to as business intelligence and analytics (BIA). Many businesses are focusing their efforts on BIA to better assist with financial planning, budgeting and financial forecasting.
If you aren’t currently harnessing the power of BIA, you may be missing out on significant insights that would allow you to fine-tune your financial strategies across your operations. There are various reasons why BIA could help add value to your business, but here are several standouts:
- Faster and stronger business decisions. Through BIA, you can streamline your financial decisions by having all your data insights in one place, instead of scattered across systems. This benefit allows your leadership team to have the information they need to drive decisions more efficiently so that your business can act on its data — not react to it.
- Sustained business growth. With BIA, you can model business projections and the potential outcome of investing in sales, marketing, recruiting or other areas. These scenario models can help you optimize your growth by allowing you to track and plan various situations so that you can see which outcomes fit your business goals the best. By giving you the tools to plan ahead, you can plan for sustained growth.
- Increased productivity. When your business planning processes are concentrated in a single area, whether that be software or a team, it allows for higher productivity levels due to the limited interactions required to analyze data findings. If you solely use software to manage these processes, productivity levels may grow even higher due to decreased staffing requirements.
- Less spreadsheets. BIA software removes the need for countless spreadsheets and reports. This streamlining frees up the time previously spent creating documents, allowing your team to be more strategic with data findings.
The demand for investing in BIA has continued to rise as more businesses aim to boost efficiencies and innovate processes, and this isn’t going to change anytime soon. Like most technology, BIA software is also continuously evolving. Traditionally, BIA technology has leveraged historical data to drive results. But with the enormous amount of data available in today’s tech-forward world, BIA technology is moving away from retroactive analysis and moving toward providing predictions. Predicting the future seems far-fetched, but in reality it’s happening now with the use of robust software programs.
At Creative Planning Business Services, we offer BIA services that can help transform your financial data into actionable insights. We’ll help you leverage innovative technology that centralizes your data and provides you with detailed intelligence about your current state of business to enable a clear view of reality. Our services could help you to predict rather than react to your financial data so that you’re ready for whatever the future holds. Contact us today to learn more about how our BIA services could evolve your financial data management.
