A 5-Minute Guide to Analytics for FP&A
Executives face it every day: high stakes decisions that are burdened with tools designed for accountants, not for decision makers with the competition at their heels. Revenue, expenses, forecasting, treasury, risk management, operations, headcount, and procurement streams in from a host of systems. Routine financial analysis can take days, if not weeks. Public companies have yet another concern: regulatory compliance. At times, the volume of data overwhelms the system and some analysis is skipped entirely. The usual tools just aren’t up to the task. Packaged applications work well for specific uses for a while. Reporting tools only extract data and report it. Statistical tools provide for those with advanced skills yet otherwise sit unused, leaving insights undiscovered. In the end, there’s always a gap — analytic needs that no traditional tool seems to address. What’s needed is an analytic tool that delivers actionable insight quickly and easily to meet finance executives’ top priorities.
Analyze budgets and expenses: Visibility into the Known & Unknown Executives should be able to get answers to key questions quickly. How do actual operating expenses compare against the budget? What’s the total amount billed, paid, or still owed? Are expenses running on par with original estimates? A financial analysis tool that fills the gap left by traditional business intelligence tools frees executives from tedious region-by-region or division-by-division views. Constantly asking IT to slice-and-dice data is time consuming and frustrating. What’s needed is a self-service discovery approach that affords quick visibility into the known and unknown. All relevant data needs to be consolidated onto one screen of intuitive and interactive visualizations, providing the crucial edge toward actionable insight – a two second advantage. Insight comes at a glance with an invitation to drill into the data to any level of detail, where changes...