An accounting team that’s both data-driven and proactive can be downright transformative. And CFOs get that: Brainyard’s Winter 2021 Survey of about 150 finance and business leaders from a range of industries shows steady, sustained demand for more effective use of data, whether to identify areas for savings, evaluate investment opportunities or deliver better reporting and key performance indicators (KPIs).
Accounting professionals that take advantage of business intelligence (BI) don’t just enjoy increased productivity and accuracy. They gain the insights to make those more informed decisions and are better able to contribute to success by providing the right data at the right time to the right people, whether internal stakeholders or clients.
What Is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence is a technology driven practice of analyzing data by developing key performance indicators (KPIs) and monitoring performance to inform decision-making. BI provides historical, current and predictive views of business operations in easy to understand, interactive, data visualizations. Organizations use business intelligence software to analyze data and inform performance metrics, such as financial, sales, marketing or operations KPIs. With BI, companies can closely track financials, optimize their supply chains and make better decisions on everything from marketing to M&A.
BI functionality centers on built-in, customizable dashboards that allow for real-time reporting and analysis based on a central database. Decision-makers can identify exceptions, trends and opportunities and drill down into any underlying metric or transaction for greater detail.
Business intelligence systems allow the entire organization to make better decisions by analyzing very large volumes of data from all lines of business. Look for a scalable system that allows for mobile access from wherever people are working and that provides a range of connectors and integrations for you applications so you can pull in all the data needed to analyze the KPIs that your organization considers important…..
