For controllers and other corporate finance professionals, decision support makes up a healthy part of your job. But too often, other things get in the way. Transaction processing still takes up about 40 percent of your week, and other things like compliance stand in the way.
Therefore, it’s more important than ever to minimize the time spent processing data from a variety of sources and increase the time spent using the outputs to make decisions.
Business Intelligence Basics
Enter business intelligence. Built to combine and connect data from a variety of sources, these solutions are designed to give you the best and most recent data. Offering business users and executives advanced visibility and control, business intelligence software leverages multiple sources to give you a complete view of your business.
So, What Is It?
According to the Business Software Education Center, the term refers both to a type of technology as well as the processes and practices that realize its potential. Designed to unlock the value of your current data, it has become increasingly important for organizations in recent years.
BI is about using software to gather information about your own business, much as the CIA gathers data about America’s enemies. And, as usually happens in the cloak and dagger world of spies, the information you need is often hard to see. BI tools bring hidden, but useful data to the surface.
How Can It Provide My Team Value?
BI can perform a huge range of valuable functions for your business. Indeed, the breadth of BI capabilities can itself be overwhelming. There are simply so many great options to choose from. At a high level, BI solutions like Microsoft Power BI offer the following features:
- Collection, analysis and visualization of data – creating charts and real time “dashboards” of business data, e.g. sales and expenses
- The combination of multiple types of data into the analysis process – presenting multi-layered graphs of the results, e.g. matching customer addresses to a map and showing their locations on the map
- Descriptive analytics – creating a summary of historical data and presenting it in visual form
- Diagnostic analysis – discovering the source of issues highlight through descriptive analytics
By shortening the time spent processing information, you can make well-informed decisions that grow your business. And if you’re looking to understand how it works, we’re excited to announce a new event this March to do just that.
Controllers Council and MIBAR to Present Business Intelligence: Simplified for Corporate Finance
With a job title like CFO or Controller, you need to keep up with all the latest at your organization to understand how it affects the finances. Luckily, for those organizations who embrace it, Business Intelligence (BI) provides the insights needed to improve decisions and position firms for greater understanding.
Watch Business Intelligence: Simplified for Corporate Finance to learn first-hand how Amir Bednarsh, Corporate Controller, at Kayco leverages Business Intelligence for an interactive, customized, and remarkably user-friendly reporting environment to provide users 24/7, cross-device and real-time access to their data.
Presented by Controllers Council and MIBAR, this event will discuss the importance of business intelligence software and provide tips on making the most out of software like Power BI, using it to facilitate decisions and do more with data.
Click here to watch now.
Additional Resources
5 Key Considerations When Implementing a Modern BI
Ten Tech Trends Set to Change the World of Corporate Finance
