Staring at spreadsheets or crunching data for hours can lead to confusion and burnout when actually trying to extract meaningful insights. But data visualisation enables you to easily turn raw, complex numbers into actionable results. In this post, we look at the ways this approach can revolutionise your financial reporting, helping to drive growth in your business.
Get Insights to Enable Swift Business Decisions
If you want to keep competing in your market, you need to be able to analyse financial data accurately and at speed in order to make data-driven decisions. With so many financial processes digitalised, you are collecting huge quantities of data about customers and operations. What do you do with all that data?
Well, you can use it to create insights that serve as the basis for decision-making in your organisation. And one of the rising stars in the world of financial reporting is data visualisation.
What is data visualisation (or visual reporting)?
Data visualisation is a more intuitive method of comprehending financial data, making the identification of key insights and trends easier. It presents that financial data in a more accessible format, making it easier to engage with. Visual reporting can help your finance team create interactive reports and dashboards that offer real-time insights into financial health. Which serves as the basis of strategy decisions.
There is a growing momentum behind data visualisation. Research and consulting firm Gartner predicts that, by 2025, data stories will be the most common way for organisations to consume analytics. It is seen as the best way to discover connections that would otherwise not be noticed by most people, helping make good, informed decisions.
But many organisations are yet to embrace the technology. This leaves them struggling to provide data or reports to key stakeholders.
The Problems with Traditional Reporting
Financial reporting is key to making decisions, but traditional reporting methods can be inefficient and problematic. The issues with it include:
- Data Silos: With separate systems storing data, it can be difficult to consolidate and analyse. This results in a fragmented view of financial health that lacks any real context.
- Spreadsheets: While still useful, these outdated technologies can be time-consuming and error-prone.
When dealing with large volumes of data, data silos and spreadsheets can lead to inaccuracies and delays in decision-making. ERP systems eliminate the issues of disparate, fragmented data, and can include data visualisation tools and automation capabilities that transcend the limitations of spreadsheets.
Why Real-time Data Matters
In the modern environment, you need to be able to access up-to-date financial data to make decisions. Spreadsheets simply cannot do this, which results in costly mistakes and missed opportunities.
Data is only helpful when it can be easily found, interpreted and put to use. When you bury that data in spreadsheets and scatter it across disparate departments, it becomes inaccessible and difficult to locate. Searching takes up valuable time, and the data your personnel does find often lacks context.
Siloed data doesn’t give you the full picture, and spreadsheets are stuck at specific moments in time. A more dynamic, centralised system is key to making the most of your data.
Customisable Dashboards Give You Power
With customisable dashboards, you have empowering tools that can help consolidate and present financial data like never before. These new solutions are becoming the go-to for frustrated management teams, and the dashboards do much more than simply display facts and figures.
You can use them to create a narrative, placing data in context and presenting graphical depictions that really bring it to life. Finance teams can easily filter data to see what is working well and what needs improvement, providing insights that can optimise operations and identify new opportunities.
Modern financial reporting revolves around customisable dashboards. They provide a real-time snapshot of the most important financial data so you can monitor KPIs and gain accurate insights into financial health. Use them to select the data points that matter to you, then visualise them in digestible ways that can be accessed by a broader audience.
- Data stories help create a narrative for the data, offering engaging context for the numbers.
- Charts and graphs provide graphical representations that visualise the data, facilitating easier identification of trends and patterns.
You can also use customisable dashboards to tailor your reporting to the audience. With cloud ERP or financial software, you can bring all the data into one place, in real time, and present it in a way that everyone can understand.
Experiment and Innovate
With these customisable dashboards at your fingertips, you can experiment, innovate and access valuable insights that wouldn’t have previously been possible. By tweaking your dashboards in different ways, leveraging real-time data, charts and graphs, you can try out ideas that could unlock new efficiencies and optimisations.
The insights enable you to look backwards and forwards, predicting future results based on the existing data. You can test ideas and make modifications to your dashboards as you go, empowering your teams to adjust quickly to changing market conditions.
The ability to experiment and innovate in this way is a huge advantage. You can maintain an edge on the competition and drive growth by visualising data in real-time.
Enhance Communication
With up-to-date snapshots of critical financial data, communication between executives and teams can be improved. Senior executives can make decisions from an informed position, and the customisable dashboard facilitates easy communication between different units and departments within the business.
The dashboards become a common language that everyone can easily understand. They break down silos and keep everyone on the same page, improving communication and nurturing a culture of data-driven decisions. And, with access to the same data at the same time, people can collaborate more effectively.
Final Thoughts
Data visualisation provides business tools that enable swift access to, and analysis of, financial data. By presenting that data in engaging, digestible forms, it facilitates informed decision-making and helps you gain a competitive advantage.
Visual reporting is intuitive and accessible, enhancing collaboration and communication. You can tweak and modify the tools to work for you, and take full advantage of uniform data sources.
Consider exploring the potential of ERP with data visualisation capabilities to improve your operations and experience the kind of results that your competitors are already accessing.
Why choose Eventura as your ERP implementation partner?
Eventura has been providing robust business solutions to countless organizations for over two decades. We are ERP experts and can identify all of your business needs, and deliver a comprehensive ERP solution that works for you.
As Sage 200 Partners and NetSuite Solution Providers, we can help you identify which solution will fit your business needs the best. Our expert team of business analysts, developers, consultants, technicians and support staff can guide you through your entire project, from initial scoping through to implementation and on-going support.
We’re also managed IT service providers meaning we can help you identify your entire IT infrastructure requirements from day one. If you would like to speak to one of our ERP experts, you can request a free call back here.
