What Is The Need Of Finance-governed Analytics?

The ideal champion to create governed analytics strategies is CFO. They make strategies that extend planning and reporting capabilities beyond finance into sales, marketing, and HR.

FREMONT, CA: It has become complicated to survive and thrive in the current volatile economy. Finance teams and line-of-business executives are required to have steady access to detailed operational metrics and financial results. Analytics software is evolving day by day, but it fails to provide accurate information, rather often give only a partial image of the business.

Several firms’ financial and operational data silos are comprised of fragmented business intelligence (BI), analytics, and corporate performance management (CPM) tools. They have to struggle to combine financial and operational plans and results, which leads to multiple versions of the truth. This usually hinders decision making and can deter leaders from collaborating.

Here are some steps companies can take to move towards finance-governed analytics:

Let finance take a strategic lead

Generally, finance teams and CFO delivers trusted and accurate financial results. It makes them the ideal internal champions to enable strategies of governed analytics that expand reporting and planning capabilities beyond finance into sales, marketing, operations, and HR. Finance teams can also earn the trust they need to become the go-to business partner for strategic, financial, and operational decision support by providing timely, accurate financial and operational insights to decision-makers. As per the survey done by FSN, top capabilities for future finance systems comprise built-in analytical tools, the capability to expand the data set, and the ability to grip unlimited amounts of information. 

Select an integrated platform that combines data, processes

To strengthen the finance team to become more strategic and provide the enterprise with finance-governed analytics, a unified technology platform is required for the companies. It is much better to depend on a unified platform rather than relying on fragmented software. Because an integrated platform can bring both financial and operational data sources together in an environment that’s comprehensive, controlled, and consumable for users. All the organizations migrate from spreadsheets, standalone BI tools, and legacy finance systems, so a platform approach is necessary that’s capable of unifying core finance processes such as financial close, budgeting, reporting, forecasting, and governed analytics.

Here are some advantages to taking an integrated platform approach: 

• By leveraging one platform for planning, reporting, and analytics across finance, sales, HR, and line-of-business operations, it removes fragmented tools and reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO).

• It can also eliminate that data latency and replication. Generally, fragmented BI tools cause data latency and replication to make sure that decision-makers are providing timely and accurate information for strategic, financial, and operational decision-making. 

Strengthen users with self-service reporting and analysis tools

To understand what type of information is required by the organization and to support their decisions and to provide them with the tools that best meet their needs. It is necessary to assess the target users in each department. Almost all the managers and executives prefer dashboards and visualizations that allow them to spot key business trends with the ability to go through the underlying details to answer business questions quickly. Other people might prefer Microsoft Excel spreadsheets as their primary reporting and analytic tool.

Governed analytics in action

More than $8 billion professional services organizations leverage governed analytics with nightly creation of more than 500 million rows of data to make a unified analytic view of book-of-record financial data and daily operational insights. Now finance and executive leaders have a logical explanation to analyze and review financial statements and dig through to customer, project, and employee-specific analytics all within a single data model.

While getting prepared to make the right decisions despite a volatile economy, a company can save significant time and costs by providing a software platform to the finance team that allows governed analytics and also enable them to provide in-depth business insight.

See Also: Top FinTech Solution Companies