Quarter End – Business Intelligence – This is what you need
Dashboards & Scorecards
A growing trend in the Reporting and Business Intelligence world is the use of dashboards and scorecards. This is no different to what businesses have been doing for many years. The only difference is that the solutions are now within reach of smaller to mid-sized companies, are easier to use, and are more distributable.
And the basic components are?
The basic components are the ability to generate a key performance indicator, the ability to compare or calculate values against that indicator, and finally a visualisation component that presents the indicator in a graphical format. Many projects fail when they are focused on the visualisation aspect of reporting and analysis. At the end of the day, if the right questions are not asked or the right KPIs are not generated, then it doesn’t matter how visual the metric is. Basic analysis is key to generating value-added investigation.
Data Visualisation - Make IT pretty
Presenting the findings with stunning visualization is a must nowadays and does make it easier for everyone to communicate.
Often, we limit our imagination on analysis as it would take too
long to manually create these types of views with the data that we accumulate. Read these questions to your vendor that will aid your ability to analysis data quickly:
- Can You quickly identify problem or random outliers in your data/history.
- Have you moved beyond spread-sheets for forecasting and statistics.
- The system should have the ability to quickly change any of these dimensions, and also to do a comparison against each other.
What to look for in good reporting and analysis solution.
• Drill up, down, lateral and across capability
• Report snapshot capability from analysis views
• Analysis capability for all users
• Good Visualisations of Data
• Multi dimensionalReporting to help you think.
Since it is Quarter End!
Another quarter-end... masses of data to analyze, complex reports to generate, and a critical deadline to get it all done!
Too often, finance departments face the same challenges at the end of every reporting period-whether it's quarter-end, or year-end.
During these periods, there are financial reports and statements such as balance sheets, cash flow statements, income statements, management reports, and even information about key performance indicators that need to be prepared during a short period of time. The more information required, the longer these tasks become!
In our latest free white paper, you will find tips and tricks to help you breeze through your reporting and financial analysis, and accurately adjust your forecasts.
Download our free whitepaper on how to Improve Your Quarter-End Analysis & Reporting