So, you’re an accountant, or financial professional? You can analyze a spreadsheet with the best of them. You can credit and debit with and you explain any portfolio, chart of accounts, balance sheet or P&L to any client. You may think that Business Intelligence tools are not applicable to your role or function but think again!
Consider the data with which you work. Numbers come from many sources within an organization and those numbers come together to paint a picture – or at least they SHOULD! Understanding trends, patterns and results can help you to help a client in ways you never dreamed possible. Using BI tools to manage your own business can also help you to achieve better results, do more for your customers, find and fix issues and capitalize on opportunities.
This article will focus on the customer side of the ledger. Think about the treasure trove of data sitting in a general ledger and in financial and accounting records. What if you could look at a customer’s objectives and data and analyze how your customer could do better? If you could anticipate developments based on patterns and trends you could offer a valuable service to your clients and improve your customer satisfaction and your revenue.
By integrating data from accounting, financial and other systems, those columns of numbers can be presented in a personalized BI dashboard for reporting, customized alerts and other valuable features and outputs that will help you to help your clients. BI tools provide multi-dimensional aggregation and analysis of data, drill down and drill through functionality to get to the root cause of problems, easy graphical and OLAP tools for reporting, and an interface that any user can adopt with ease. You don’t have to be a programmer or statistical analyst to use these self-serve tools.
You can accurately forecast and anticipate results and help your clients see how to balance business growth, expenses and financial investments. You can use data mining to suggest ways to improve results. If you are an auditor, you can leverage the features within BI tools and solutions to find and analyze critical areas and results and thereby help your clients to be proactive in their approach to business management, as well as providing crucial feedback on governmental, regulatory and industry compliance, and standards. If you work in the Financial Services industry, you can use BI tools and personalized dashboards to monitor results, transactions, rate and price changes, etc.
When considering business intelligence tools, it is important to look for solutions that are easily integrated with accounting systems like Tally, SAP, and Navision, as well as ERP, SCM and CRM systems – in short, any critical enterprise system that may contain data to be used for accounting, financial and/or investment analysis. With the right tools, your business can expand its client services and offer dependable, valuable advice that will attract and retain customers, and partners.
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