Business Analytics For The Office Of Finance

The vast majority of CFO’s are now taking a more prominent role in decision-making, beyond the traditional role of finance.  The Office of Finance needs access to tools and best practices that allows them to be ready for the challenge.  These leaders need to know where their organization is headed.  They need to know how they are doing, what will happen, when it will happen and why it will happen.  In finance, you have to be able to analyze current conditions, anticipate performance gaps and their effect on the business and then optimize outcomes, all while worrying about compliance and risk.

There are solutions for financial and management reporting, analysis and advanced analytics, planning, consolidation, disclosure management, governance, risk and compliance.  They are integrated, secure, auditable, scalable, on-premise or cloud based.

Don’t try to solve all of your problems at once, pick a need, address a pressing concern.  Once you have success in one area you can build upon that success.  Once you have a solution in place that eliminates disconnected pockets of data, reduces cycle times, increases the trusted access to actual, targets and forecasts and helps provide a single version of the truth you are then able to focus on the activities that truly add value to your organization.  You can start to use best practices by adopting driver-based rolling forecasts, you can monitor performance gaps, respond to changing business conditions with confidence, speed and flexibility.

The Office of Finance needs to focus on looking forward, determining where the company is going, not backward and simply report on what the company has done.  The Office of Finance needs to lead the charge in deploying this throughout the enterprise, bring operational results in sync with financial results.

A company’s decisions are only as good as the data that it is relying upon to make them.  If that information if not accurate, timely and complete the decision making process will suffer.  Deploying Business Analytic solutions will help in all three of those areas and allow the Office of Finance to focus on forward looking activities,

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