The next Board meeting is coming up on Monday – as a member of the executive team your weekend can go one of two ways; 1. You can spend the weekend pulling data, reading spreadsheets and making sure you have all the most up to date information prepared, or 2. You can log into your financial management platform and export real time reports to present in the meeting. Now more than ever there is a dire need to improve financial visibility with real time reporting and data in your organization to help track the right KPIS and increase profit margins.
Whether you need to perform budgeting and planning, set goals and plan projects, strategize new investments, figure where you can cut costs, set pricing, etc. CFOs and executive leaders must possess real-time data from all aspects of the organization’s financial performance to be able to make the best decisions. Utilizing a cloud based financial management platform can help take your organization to the next level. See these 3 ways to improve financial visibility for your executive team.
1. Real Time Reporting through Dashboards
Financial dashboards should drive action and decision-making through key performance indicators based on real time data. As transactions across your organization post from AP, AR, inventory, HR, etc., general ledger data is immediately visible through dashboards and reports providing financial insight.
Each employee’s profile can show different metrics on their dashboards making visible the data most relevant to the decisions they need to make. Financial dashboards convey the big picture at a glance and can be tailored to each employee, ensuring the metrics that matter most to each employee—populate their dashboards with live data.
For example: a finance employee working in purchasing will be able to see the inventory status and help them pull sales reports. They can then take advantage of a vendor having a sale on different items to fill stock for the company and obtain long term cost savings.
2. Increase Profit Margins with the Right Data at Your Fingertips
When utilizing the right financial management tool, you can track the right KPIs that will make analyzing data, projects, cash flow, inventory easier than ever. It is important financial data is captured at every point throughout your organization to help lower costs, improve profit margins and drive the best financial decisions.
What exactly can financial dashboards show you to increase visibility in your entire organization and help increase profit margins?
- Track the Right KPIs: Automation that sifts through multiple data streams to track the data you need to manage your defined KPIs.
- Immediate Financial Access to: Core financials such as General Ledger, accounts payable/receivable, order management, cash flow, and the Digital Board Book are immediately available in Sage Intacct.
- Customer Tracking: Track conversion rates, CAC (customer acquisition costs), CLTV (customer lifetime value), and churn. These KPIs reveal the extent to which your marketing campaigns are driving actual growth for your organization.
- Save Money on Capital Expenses: Automation helps your organization to become more agile.
- Collaboration for Data Driven Decisions: Increase collaboration among departments with a system that makes it easy to share annual budgets, sales reports, and departmental financials with executive leaders to ensure transparency.
For example: If you are a service-oriented company working on different customer projects you can compare an upcoming customer project needs to similar past projects. Having access to this data at your fingertips will allow you to analyze project costs and profitability to create a pricing model as you see all real time costs to help improve your project profit margins. Automations allow you to get immediate alerts on projects and profitability.
3. Consolidating Financials Across your Organization or Multi-entities
Having dispersed data can leave your finance team feeling trapped in a sea of spreadsheets, probably operating in one or more outdated information systems, and performing patchwork processes just to make sense of the data across the organization or multiple entities. Modern cloud based financial management systems have dashboards that allow you visibility into this data at your fingertips. View these consolidated reports or click into the data to drill down to see:
- Growth and profitability as a whole or drill down into multiple entities.
- How automated billing, expense tracking and consolidations shave weeks off the monthly close.
- How your leaders are helped to pinpoint the most and least, profitable entities or organization products/projects with self-service reports.
- Your data “sliced and diced” in real-time dashboards and eliminate Excel spreadsheets.
- The benefits of delegating accounting tasks across entities while keeping individual and top-level entities secure.
With faster consolidation processes, increased visibility across projects, and an ability to focus on higher-level strategic issues such as acquisitions your organization can streamline operations to better compete in today’s market.
Executives are struggling even more frequently now than prior to the pandemic to access updated insights. With a lot of organizations having remote teams working from home and often struggling to get the same data, applications, and coordination; it’s vital to increase information accessibility and improve financial visibility. COVID-19 continues to put new demands on data as CFOs and executive leaders work to control cash flow, streamline accounts receivable, manage projects or inventory, and operate efficiently and within budget. They need to access reports and metrics that reflect the latest data available in order to make real time decisions that affect the organization faster than ever before.
Watch a short Demo to see how you can improve financial visibility within your organization with the #1 rated cloud accounting and financial management software rated by the ACIPA.
