Financial intelligence is the organizational philosophy that motivates the world’s greatest financial teams in today’s technology-driven economy.
Financial intelligence is higher-order thinking facilitated by a finance team having the necessary processes and tools in place. It’s not just a question of gathering and reporting data. It’s an insight that creates and enables value. It promotes empowerment, proactivity, and competence.
Many businesses have resorted to business intelligence tools to improve their financial reporting and acquire financial insight. Data research, visualization, and sharing have aided firms in making more informed and timely decisions. Also, Insurance has been a mechanism that helps to cover the costs associated with property damage and liability claims of many businesses, thereby improving their financial statements. GoNectar.com is one of those firms that can help you fuel your insurance business if you own one.
Obstacles to acquiring financial intelligence
Finance departments have very different data needs than other departments, and business intelligence does not match their criteria. For example, it’s difficult to explore variance concerns on the dashboard since they need a deep dive into journal entries or sub-ledger transactions, which are not covered by the summary data. This data is dispersed over several tables in the ERP system and is insufficiently structured to be loaded into the data warehouse used by your BI solution. While business intelligence tools may provide aesthetically pleasing dashboards, they lack the functionality necessary to address the banking industry’s particular difficulties.
According to financial reporting experts, business intelligence and financial intelligence are not synonymous. If any of these concerns exist with your business tools, you may need to locate a different solution to get true financial insight.
The “holy grail” of financial reporting is real-time data. A reporting solution must be immediately linked to an ERP and other systems to enable users to work with real-time data. It increases finance professionals’ productivity by allowing them to quickly examine a trial balance issue or check that an adjustment was correctly made throughout the closing process. Due to a lack of real-time data, financial institutions must depend on old, out-of-date data that must be manually changed. Another hazard is that human error might result in inaccurate data being utilized by other business users.
Rather than being automated, reporting is mostly done manually. Even the most onerous reporting tasks can be simplified by financial reporting tools that enable the rapid preparation of a wide range of reports. So, IT and finance developers are free to function at the speed of business rather than depending on IT. Finance departments may spend less time producing reports and more time analyzing them for key insights now that repeatable and refreshable reports are available at the click of a button.
Merging data from several sources requires considerable work. Financial intelligence data is generated by various platforms, not only your ERP. An ERP system may need to combine data from other mission-critical business systems, such as customer relationship management and human resource management (HRM). Manually merging several data sets and reports in Excel exacerbates the situation, resulting in wasted labor and a greater likelihood of errors.
Self-service reporting is not accessible. The majority of ERP reporting structures are inaccessible to the average finance user, forcing finance teams to depend on developers and IT to generate reports. Finance departments may create customized reports and ad hoc inquiries at any moment by using financial reporting tools that are intimately familiar with ERP systems and their underlying data structures.
Only with the proper data access and financial intelligence can you release a powerful narrative that tells an even more compelling story about your business. You’ll have more confidence in your financial expertise when you use insight software’s reporting options. If you’re a numbers freak, create dynamic spreadsheets with real-time data. If you are not, you may still benefit from dashboards and visual analytics.
With reliable data and a team that understands finance, your business may enhance performance and achieve great success.
