5 Tips for Quickly Mitigating Your Company’s Financials

The current epidemic is affecting the global economy in unexpected ways, so how are businesses mitigating their finances to navigate through these times?

Finance departments are on damage control attempting to quickly revise everything from expected revenues to updating expense reports to reflect recent layoffs. Budgets and forecasts need to be recalculated and the ability to quickly update financials with actionable insights has proven to be invaluable for the future of organizations.

Let’s dive into our 5 tips for quickly mitigating your company's financials.

  1. Incorporate Real-Time Reporting

  2. Automate FP&A

  3. Consolidate Data Sources

  4. Implement an Augmented Intelligence Platform

  5. Derive Accurate, Actionable Analytics

Incorporate Real-Time Reporting

Even with the vast number of technological developments, reporting on a company-wide basis still requires improvements. The current method of manually inputting data combined with the consistency of human error is a lag that requires mending. Staying afloat in the current economic landscape is highly reliant on drilling down into endless excel templates and interpreting them in an efficient manner. Rossum, for instance, extracts data from business documents and provides a way to derive actionable analytics. Minute by minute changes can be tracked, updated, and utilized making it easier than ever to source mistakes, create department-specific KPI’s and react quickly to market changes.

"The more real-time and granular we can get, the more responsive, and more competitive, we can be.” Peter Levine, VC and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz

Automate FP&A

Workplace automation is a popular subject in today’s economic landscape and for a good reason. Finance incorporates a large number of data sets from numerous departments meaning small changes can be tedious, time-consuming, and lead to large errors that can ultimately be devastating. Accelerating processes by automating FP&A, using a platform such as DataRails, allows for a reduction in time without redundancies. By speeding up the generating of financial reports, more time is left to analyze the data and catch errors before important decisions are made.

“Automation is cost-cutting by tightening the corners and not cutting them.” Haresh Sippy - Chief Founder & Managing Director of Tema India Ltd

Consolidate Data Sources

Bringing together multiple sources of financial information into one integrated interface has numerous benefits that can be invaluable to an organization. By consolidating data sources using software like Rephop, known for making group reporting easy, you can achieve a clear view of the health of a company while assisting in easier reporting. With the current economic climate, having all available financial information in one place makes any decision faster and more accurate. Fusing together financial data from all departments simultaneously provides a clear way to troubleshoot mistakes and find inconsistencies without the need to navigate through endless ERP, HR, and CRM systems. Increasing the flow, efficiency, and control of data within a company gives stakeholders insights and added value while in many cases reducing costs. Not only can the organization use this information in an internal and external capacity it can be utilized in every department to make smarter decisions now and in the future.

“Think analytically, rigorously, and systematically about a business problem and come up with a solution that leverages the available data.” – Michael O’Connell, chief analytics officer, TIBCO.

Implement an Augmented Intelligence Platform

Augmented intelligence platforms provide organizations the means of leveraging financial and operational data independently, regardless of the technical competency of their staff. These platforms, such as Stratifyd, combine data with business intelligence to derive actionable insights hidden within large data sets. Within the finance department, this includes everything from performance variances, horizontal, and vertical analysis, the slicing and dicing of data, drill-downs, and the ability to perform ad-hoc analyses to discover trends and actionable insights. The right platform will make it easy to deliver data in an easily digestible manner for quick and concise decision making.

“Augmented intelligence is all about people taking advantage of AI. As AI technology evolves, the combined human and AI capabilities that augmented intelligence allows will deliver the greatest benefits to enterprises.” - Svetlana Sicular, research vice president at Gartner

Derive Accurate, Actionable Analytics

With the right financial analytics solution, it is easy to implement small changes that provide valuable results. By making currently available financial data more digestible through visually appealing and easily understood insights - quick, accurate decision making is possible. The ability to stay afloat is currently reliant on drilling down into endless excel templates and interpreting them in an efficient manner. However, having the ability to understand financial analytics and devise a plan for the future gives businesses the advantage of easily adapting and overcoming the strange times we find ourselves in today.

Coming out on top is possible, all it takes is accurate, real-time financial data.

“The human side of analytics is the biggest challenge to implementing big data.” – Paul Gibbons, author of “The Science of Successful Organizational Change.”