All Heroes Wear KPIs: 5 Steps to Becoming a Financial Reporting Superhero
How do you measure success? In a commercial environment, you can gain a competitive edge by making sure that your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are informed and agile, much like Superman chasing a villain.
But what makes someone a financial reporting superhero? A financial reporting superhero chooses financial targets based on as much information as possible, and that means acting on intelligence. Your organization is probably already collecting a wealth of useful stats and information – but the data may be scattered throughout different databases and spreadsheets. A financial reporting superhero knows how to bring all that disparate data and knowledge together and manipulate it into targets and reporting reflective of where you’ve been, and where you’re going.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss five ‘superpowers’ to give you a taste of what’s possible. Who knows – with this much power – you could save the world. Or, at the very least, deliver the best and most up-to-the-minute financial reporting possible!
1. Extreme Intelligence
As well as having information scattered around the business, you’ll probably find that there are already financial KPIs in place – some you knew about, some you didn’t. That’s OK. We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel – we’re trying to give it a Nitro boost. So, get to know your organization’s existing financial KPIs – even if they’re outdated or need some work. Through the superpowers of Sage Data & Analytics (SD&A), you’ll be able to fend off any unexpected super villains (disconnected objects) to migrate all of your company data successfully.
2. Choose Your Weapon
Wonder Woman has her lasso. Captain America has his mighty shield. Superman has his cape. When it comes to financial reporting, your weapon of choice is a great data platform to underpin a superb set of financial dashboards. Trying to create metrics is no job for mere mortals – it takes forever, and it only takes one mutant manual entry to throw everything off. SD&A is ERP-agnostic, so you can choose to work with our complete legion of system tools or utilize the best suited features for your mission into what you already use.
3. Become a Time Traveler
If you’re trying to manipulate space and time while searching for the all-important information that financial measurements depend on – things like profit and loss forecasts, balance sheets, and so on, then SD&A can set space-time coordinates for you through its pre-packaged through its pre-packaged analytics and dashboards. Of course, you could keep collating everything manually and feeding it in yourself. But you will need more than understanding of the mystic arts and interdimensional travel to avoid getting stuck in a time warp.
4. Trust Your Sidekick
Every superhero needs a sidekick. We know that many users will already have theirs such as Power BI from Microsoft, a hugely popular business analytics tool, in no small part because of its basic functionality, and is free to use. Loyalty being a superpower within itself, SD&A works with Power BI, being one of a wide range of the existing tools your organization may be using that integrates seamlessly with our financial reporting and analysis SaaS. And just like you don’t want to start a superhero adventure getting to know your new sidekick, we have a range of free apps to help you build a data warehouse that’s as robust and joined-up as possible.
5. Achieve Omnipotence
Once your next data mission is revealed, you’ll want to automate the data management processes as much as you can so you can run financial reports and check KPIs proactively. Set your system to alert you if you’re underperforming on certain aspects during the month so you can take affirmative action. Schedule reports to be generated regularly without needing to do anything. Enable constant monitoring to catch all those pesky exceptions and anomalies proactively. SD&A has processes to enable all these variables and many more. If it all sounds a bit overwhelming, don’t worry – your SD&A partner will be with you every step of the way, watching over you from our secret HQ – we’re a bit like Batman’s Butler Alfred that way.
Conclusion
These five tips should give you measurable, manipulatable KPIs and financial dashboards you can believe in. If you’re ready to light the Bat Signal to learn more about how SD&A can make you the office Superhero, connect with your NetatWork Account manager today and tell them you’d like to see which SD&A Superhero cape fits your business best!
Note: Content for this blog post was provided by ZAP Business Intelligence.
