How to Gain Data Analytics Capabilities in Finance & Accounting?
Technology has been consistently supporting various industries for a few decades now. Since businesses are increasingly relying upon technology for numerous processes and operations, accounting and finance functions are no exceptions. In addition, regular developments in technology improve AI, ML, RPA, blockchain, and data analytics, which play a crucial role in making accounting and finance operations more transparent, efficient, and agile.
According to a report – “The Impact of Big Data on Finance – Now and in the Future” by the Institute of Management Accounting (IMA), organizations are embracing big data, and finance/accounting professionals are shifting a little more toward data analytics. Source
The Scope of Data Analytics for Accountants & Your Business
An accountant’s primary job is to provide precise financial information to management in order to add value to their decision-making capabilities. Given this purpose, they can use finance analytics to derive highly valuable insights from colossal financial data sets. This can help them identify bottlenecks in financial management, further helping decision-makers to prepare more reasonable budgets in the future.
Moreover, with the results obtained via analytics, accountants can play a more strategic role, providing financial advice and solutions to business owners.
With the accounting and finance sector rapidly growing, it is high time to understand the importance of financial analytics for your business. Let’s read a few points indicating the same.
- Financial data analytics can help your firm drive investments and operating decisions using data confidently while mitigating risks.
- Financial analytics is a part of the digital transformation wave across industries which drastically transforms legal finance functions.
- Its core motive is to deliver a detailed analytics report, helping you find answers to their questions, predict future financial situations, and prepare for the same.
- It helps you build a business strategy that is based on factual insights you can rely upon rather than a rough idea of what the numbers say.
How Does Data Analytics Add Value to Accounting & Finance Operations?
By embracing financial analytics services, your accountants can adopt a stronger financial assessment approach where large-size data sets can be analyzed and verified efficiently, and quickly in a hassle-free manner. Consequently, you can rest assured about the accuracy of the results while getting more fruitful recommendations.
Your accountants might also assist you in making investment decisions. In this case, using big data and financial analytics, they can identify behavioral patterns and trends in consumers and the marketplace. Furthermore, these patterns can help you determine more suitable investment opportunities, leading to higher profit margins.
Finance analytics can be performed better when you and your accountants know exactly what to do. Therefore, to learn how you can leverage your accounting and finance data, let’s learn more about:
How Your Business Can Make the Best Out of Financials Using Analytics
Financial analytics is a cycle that needs to be performed from time to time in order to detect and rectify finance and accounting issues. To become a strong competitor in your industry, you must have the capability to take multiple advantages of financial insights. You need to comprehend the value of the abundance of data you generate internally, collect from external sources, and curate to make data sets usable.
Financial analytics is a highly beneficial business tool, which, if used appropriately, can deliver insights helpful enough in making informed business decisions, enabling you to outperform your industry peers. You can actually achieve all this by building analytics capabilities and converting insights into evident results.
6 Easy Steps to Gain Finance Analytics Capabilities
It All Begins with Financial Assessment
The very first step to starting financial analytics is to pick a starting point for implementation, which begins with a detailed and unbiased assessment of financials in order to understand your company’s current financial situation. This will also bring insights into issues and finance and accounting process-related gaps you need to bridge. The primary purpose of this assessment is to determine areas that require improvements on an urgent basis.
Have Questions – as Many as You Can
- What actually drives value in my business?
- How does my company measure performance against objectives?
- How does my company measure market competition?
- Where and when should I invest to get optimum returns?
- What information do I need for finances?
The foundation of financial analytics lies in knowing where to obtain the most relevant and valuable insights. You must consider your company’s overall financial processes and strategy before asking these or other important questions.
Once The Key Information is Obtained, Leave no Room for Any Delay
You may use automation tools that can deliver the captured data straight to your team of financial analysts. As soon as this team receives information, as fast as they can perform various analyses and provide the final report to you promptly. With or without automation, you should speed up the entire process, enabling yourself to take the appropriate actions faster or at least before things go out of control.
Make Sure Your Analytical Reports are Visually Appealing and Easy-to-Understand
It is essential to have accurate information on your finances and accounting. It is equally important to present that information so that readers (partners, stakeholders, and investors) can easily understand everything. It should be in an engaging format; for instance, these reports can include graphs, charts, tables, or anything that encourages readers to dig deeper and look for answers to questions these reports raise.
Establish a Culture for Your Business that Makes it Run on Facts
To make your company financially sound in today’s complex business environment, you might need to do a lot more than just follow your intuition for finance management. Instead, you need to build a fact-driven, analytics-based corporate culture essential for your business’s better financial performance. By doing this consistently, you can use analytical evaluations and results to streamline finance and accounting processes.
Also Read: Leveraged Finance vs Corporate Finance – Explain It
Select Analytics Tools Fitting Best with Your Analytical Requirements
To ensure obtaining highly valuable insights, you need to select the right finance and accounting solutions. Consider investing in tools that;
- Are appropriate as per your current needs
- Can be integrated with other applications and tools
- Offer higher flexibility, allowing you to alter them as per your changing needs in the future
By following these easy steps, you can build finance analytics capabilities that will help your business acknowledge and rectify financial challenges that might have been restricting growth. However, it is often not easy to go about analytics for several reasons, such as a lack of expertise or a shortage of resources to hire experienced financial analysts.
Pranab Bhandari is an Editor of the Financial Blog “Financebuzz”. Apart from writing informative financial articles for his blog, he is a regular contributor to many national and international publications namely Tweak Your Biz, Growth Rocks ETC.
