Financial Business Intelligence: Turbo-Charge Your Finance Department

In today’s data-driven business context, the ability to make informed financial decisions is increasingly important, but also complex. Many accounting and finance teams still rely almost entirely on tedious Excel reporting that takes many hours to repopulate with every new report version. Financial Business Intelligence platforms aim to automate as much of this work as possible and provide far better reporting and analytics visuals than traditional Excel can offer.

What is Financial Business Intelligence?

Financial Business Intelligence is a specialized area of analytics that leverages data analytics, reporting tools, and visualization to gain actionable insight on an organization’s financial health and opportunities. The aim is to improve reporting while reducing the time you spend creating reports that are viewed every day, week or month. It gives you the time and resources to understand and share the results of your reporting, instead of generating those reports.

There are several reasons to explore this as an option for your business:

• Real-time Insights: Immediate access to financial data for timely decision-making
• Enhanced Forecasting: Accurate predictions for budgeting and planning
• Risk Mitigation: Identification of potential financial risks and opportunities
• Operational Efficiency: Streamlined financial processes and reduced costs
• Compliance and Governance: Ensuring adherence to financial regulations

Where Should You Start?

A baseline business intelligence solution includes collection of data, combining and cleaning data as needed, followed by analysis and interpretation, and finally includes a straightforward way to share and collaborate around what you have created.

To better understand these different elements, we recommend becoming acquainted with business intelligence dashboarding and the analytics maturity model. These articles can help in understanding the end product and the different stages to a mature business intelligence solution.

Next, decide what your initial financial analytics and accounting analytics goals as an organization should be, around your financial business intelligence. It is real-time reporting, more interactive analysis, and creating a single version of the truth are all great examples. What reports do you currently spend significant time generating over and over? Consider all the different data systems you use and which ones might provide new insight if you were to combine them for analysis.

Finally choose a platform for your goals. Domo for example, is an established leader and an optimal solution for many reasons:

• Performant: Sub-second response time is one of the most important drivers of user adoption
• Automated Data: Domo provides over 1,000 prebuilt connectors for the most popular business systems in use
• User-Friendly Interface: You don’t need to be a data expert or programmer to use Domo
• Customization: Easy drag-and-drop dashboard design with over 100 chart types to choose from
• Data Integration: Combine and integrate in a low-code / no-code fashion, across data sources
• Scalability: Scales easily as your business grows
• Sharing: No need to attach password-locked attachments to e-mails; instead share your reports with management directly and safely from and within Domo
• Security/Governance: Robust data protection features, with mature data governance
• Tracking: Quickly see who is viewing what content to track true engagement
• ROI: Quick ROI based on fast implementations, above average user adoption driving enhanced decision-making

New to Data?

While Domo is one of the most user-friendly interfaces available for Financial Business Intelligence (and most other kinds of of analytics), some of the concepts of leveraging raw / source data may be new to you. A reliable consulting firm can help you in areas such as:

• Data Preparation: Ensuring data accuracy and consistency
• Workflow Building: Creating efficient data workflows that combine, clean or revise your data
• Customization: Tailoring solutions to meet your specific business needs
• Training: Empowering your team with the skills needed for long-term success
• Problem Solving: Addressing challenges in a way that scales well and minimizes maintenance

Summary

Strong Financial Business Intelligence is quickly becoming the standard as finance and accounting professionals move away from manually generating reports for days before conducting financial analysis and then presenting them. You will want to consider your business needs, as well as each item in the lists above before choosing a platform to build your new reports in. At Graphable, we have a team of experienced data experts that can guide you through intricacies like this and gain much better insight from your reporting solutions.

For related analytics and Domo-specific topics, check out these articles

• What makes a compelling business intelligence dashboard?
• Domo vs Tableau – What are the differences?
• Domo demo video
• What makes a great business intelligence consultant?
• Best BI solutions?
• What is Domo analytics?
• The Domo Platform
• Domo dashboards
• Dashboarding – what it is is and how to begin
• What are digital dashboards?
• Domo maps,
• Domo analyzer (KPI builder and ad hoc UI)
• Domo Workbench
• Domo custom connector – how to
• Build a Domo JSON connector
• Domo variables
• Domo everywhere
• Create a Domo app
• The power of Business Intelligence Services