Description
The Role of Business Intelligence Dashboards in Financial Management
The Role of Business Intelligence Dashboards
in Financial Management
Tony Bray
Abstract
Finance Directors and managers need access to relevant, accurate
management information in order to make confident decisions about business
performance. In today’s rapidly changing business environment, the need for a
fast, efficient solution for accessing management and financial data has never
been more critical. We explore the role of business intelligence dashboards in
enhancing access to key management information and how they contribute to
improved corporate decision-making.
Incorporating ASSET & RISK REVIEW
Biography
Tony Bray is Intuitive Business Intelligence’s Managing Director. Tony has
held senior management positions in the software industry for over thirty
years and was previously co-owner of Version One Ltd., one of the fastest-
growing technology companies in Europe. He co-founded Intuitive Business
Intelligence with Roger Stocker and Edward Smith in 2010. Intuitive
Business Intelligence is the authors of the advanced business intelligence
software tool, Intuitive Dashboards.
Tony Bray
Managing Director
Intuitive Business
Intelligence
Keywords Business intelligence (BI), KPIs, Financial dashboards, financial management
Paper type Research, Case study
Introduction
Growing the value of a business takes time, effort, investment and a clear
strategy for increasing revenues and profitability. Most organizations begin
modestly and grow steadily over time, resulting from a sustained sales and
marketing effort which enables them to increase their client base, refine their
value proposition and grow market share.
In a smaller business with simple systems and processes, it is quite easy for the
Finance Director and managers to gain visibility of what is happening in the
business. With a small management team working closely together, they can
speak directly to colleagues to get an instant picture of sales opportunities,
market trends and issues that may affect the financial status of the business.
As a business grows organically or through acquisition, it must support more
customers, new products and a larger workforce. Managing an expanded
business brings two major headaches to the Finance team. First, scaling up a
business demands that structured systems and processes are implemented to
manage business operations effectively; secondly, if a business has grown
through acquisition, the merged entity will also need to successfully integrate the
legacy systems and processes utilized in the separate businesses.
So, while the Finance Director remains intimately connected to the financial
position of the business, he continues to face the challenge of finding ways to
enhance overall performance across all operational areas of the organization.
The simple truth is that key management information is frequently locked within
departmental “silos” – a huge range of disparate information systems within
varied functions of the business. The ability to gain a fast and accurate
snapshot of performance becomes a time-consuming, inefficient and costly
exercise in generating reports, many of which are out of date by the time the
report is received and do not contain the most critical and relevant data on which
to base important business decisions.
Connecting silos of information to achieve performance excellence
Reviewing business performance is central to understanding which areas the
business needs to improve and the specific actions you must take to remain
competitive and profitable. But with each department running their own data
systems, which work well and represent a significant investment in time, training
and money to the business, is there a faster way to connect these silos of
information and realize the value of the data they contain?
Imagine that one of your clients calls your helpdesk team repeatedly during the
course of week, with a range of different queries and issues about your product.
The client has a support contract with you, but as your helpdesk system is not
connected to your accounts software, help-desk staff are unaware that the client
2 Credit Control
The Role of Business Intelligence Dashboards in Financial Management
has an unpaid invoice outstanding for six months and, therefore, has breached
the terms of their support agreement.
Business Intelligence (BI) dashboards enable senior managers to see what is
going on in parts of the business they would not normally have sight of, by
enabling disparate information within existing systems to be consolidated and
presented in a single, graphical, easy-to-understand dashboard view. The
inherent customisability of BI dashboads also enables different end-users to
view the information most meaningful to them in a variety of graphical formats,
even if the source data is not stored within their own department’s systems. For
example, a Finance Director can view key financial data such as cashflow,
creditors and debtors, but also sales against target and sales by product, total
hours billed and resource utilisation, and advertising expenditure. The ability to
instantly gain access to a holistic snapshot of organizational performance
provides a demonstrable advantage over the reams of lengthy, unintelligable
and quick to outdate reports typically produced for financial reporting
requirements.
Key benefits of implementing a business intelligence dashboard
The most intuitive dashboard solutions enable the Finance Director to quickly
and easily respond to the three most critical questions he’s likely to face:
A business intelligence dashboard provides proactive alerts to potential
shortfalls in performance, such as variances to cashflow projections, issues with
debtors and creditors, or potential threats to projected turnover or profitability. By
consolidating information from a range of existing data sources including
accounting tools, ERP systems, spreadsheets, CRM, HR and other business
software, business intelligence dashboards provide a more holistic, singular
viewpoint of performance. This “at-a-glance” perspective not only enables
corrective steps to be taken quickly when performance dips below stated
metrics, but it also highlights opportunities and positive trends. Finally, business
intelligence dashboards provide the ability to drill-down through the data to the
root cause of potential issues with just a few quick and simple mouse-clicks.
In real-terms, there are numerous immediate benefits for the Finance team from
the use of a BI dashboard:
3 Credit Control
The Role of Business Intelligence Dashboards in Financial Management
•
•
Increase the speed of your budgeting process and the relevance of your
budget.
Prepare forecasts faster, with greater insight and accuracy.
1.
2.
3.
How are we doing against stated metrics?
Why are we on- or off-track? and
What actions do we need to take today?
4 Credit Control
The Role of Business Intelligence Dashboards in Financial Management
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Ensure realistic results and improved performance when plans, budgets,
and forecasts all work seamlessly with each other.
Account for one-time or unusual events that can skew results and plans.
Generate effective plans without statistical expertise.
Reduce reliance on one-off spreadsheets for budgets, plans, and reports.
Decrease the time spent on planning, budgeting, and forecasting cycles.
Gain better insight into company performance and the factors that drive
the business.
Be more efficient at analysis.
Improve decision-making.
Produce more reliable information to help drive better results.
Case study: Concorde IT Group
Concorde IT Group provides award-winning managed IT and IT infrastructure services
designed to cover the entire lifecycle of an organization’s IT systems from consultancy,
design and implementation, to ongoing support and management.
The company quickly acquired a business shortly after formation in 1985, and has
acquired a further three companies since 2008. Continuing to focus on growth through
acquisition, Concorde IT Group’s senior management team is actively researching
complimentary businesses to acquire and has an aggressive growth target to double in
size by 2013.
As a result of their growth strategy, the management team faced a number of significant
obstacles to improving their overall business performance. With a defined objective of
realising better financial insight from the existing systems, the senior management team,
led by Chief Executive Officer Colin Meakin, decided to implement a corporate-wide
business intelligence (BI) solution, based on Intuitive Dashboards from Intuitive Business
Intelligence.
The company’s recent acquisitions meant that they had three entirely different accounting
and sales order processing (SOP) systems in place, which they wanted to consolidate as
a single, accurate viewpoint of the company’s financial position at any given time. In
addition, they operated a range of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and help-
desk systems, which they also intended to connect together.
By implementing Intuitive Dashboards across their accounting and SOP systems, the
senior management team have been able to resolve the issue of not knowing how the
acquired companies are performing. According to Colin Meakin, “We experienced the
pain of not knowing how well our acquired companies were doing; unless we were
prepared to train on the acquired, often legacy, systems, which isn’t practical or cost-
efficient, we needed a fast solution. Intuitive Dashboards fixed this pain in an instant with
no training required.”
5 Credit Control
The Role of Business Intelligence Dashboards in Financial Management
This article first appeared in CREDIT CONTROL JOURNAL (incorporating Asset & Risk Review),
Volume 32 Number 5 & 6 2011
Published by:
House of Words Limited
7 Greding Walk, Hutton, Brentwood, Essex, CM13 2UF UK
Website: www.creditcontrol.co.uk
© 2011 House of Words Ltd
Meakin continues, “If you know how much you’re selling, how much profit you’re making
or conversely, how much you’re not selling or how much profit you’re not making, you can
take the steps you need – cut costs, boost sales – to achieve the profitability you’ve set
as your target. And the profitability provides the means for us to invest more heavily in
enhancing our brand and maintain exceptional client satisfaction. With Intuitive
Dashboards, we have our finger on the pulse of our business and it’s a dynamic reading;
we don’t have to wait for management accounts to be published to tell us how well we’re
performing.”
Concorde IT Group’s implementation of Intuitive Dashboards links seamlessly to their
existing data systems, MS Dynamics, Sage, CRM, help-desk systems and numerous
spreadsheets, presenting a consolidate view of the most important business data in the
right amount of detail and in an easy-to-use graphical format.
Meakin concludes, “We’ve realised fast ROI from our implementation. Now, we’re no
longer driving the business whilst looking in the rear view mirror, as Intuitive Dashboards
allows us to see over the horizon and take fast, corrective action.”
BI: a must for financial management success
An effective BI dashboard solution is a “must have” in today’s financial
environment. Companies in all industries are using BI dashboards to enhance
their decision-making processes across all functions. With the extended
responsibilities placed on the FD, dashboards represent a cost-effective, fast to
implement solution that can deliver “quick wins” by leveraging existing
investments in varied data systems across all operational teams to provide real-
time insight into an organization’s business and financial position.
doc_433106354.pdf
The Role of Business Intelligence Dashboards in Financial Management
The Role of Business Intelligence Dashboards
in Financial Management
Tony Bray
Abstract
Finance Directors and managers need access to relevant, accurate
management information in order to make confident decisions about business
performance. In today’s rapidly changing business environment, the need for a
fast, efficient solution for accessing management and financial data has never
been more critical. We explore the role of business intelligence dashboards in
enhancing access to key management information and how they contribute to
improved corporate decision-making.
Incorporating ASSET & RISK REVIEW
Biography
Tony Bray is Intuitive Business Intelligence’s Managing Director. Tony has
held senior management positions in the software industry for over thirty
years and was previously co-owner of Version One Ltd., one of the fastest-
growing technology companies in Europe. He co-founded Intuitive Business
Intelligence with Roger Stocker and Edward Smith in 2010. Intuitive
Business Intelligence is the authors of the advanced business intelligence
software tool, Intuitive Dashboards.
Tony Bray
Managing Director
Intuitive Business
Intelligence
Keywords Business intelligence (BI), KPIs, Financial dashboards, financial management
Paper type Research, Case study
Introduction
Growing the value of a business takes time, effort, investment and a clear
strategy for increasing revenues and profitability. Most organizations begin
modestly and grow steadily over time, resulting from a sustained sales and
marketing effort which enables them to increase their client base, refine their
value proposition and grow market share.
In a smaller business with simple systems and processes, it is quite easy for the
Finance Director and managers to gain visibility of what is happening in the
business. With a small management team working closely together, they can
speak directly to colleagues to get an instant picture of sales opportunities,
market trends and issues that may affect the financial status of the business.
As a business grows organically or through acquisition, it must support more
customers, new products and a larger workforce. Managing an expanded
business brings two major headaches to the Finance team. First, scaling up a
business demands that structured systems and processes are implemented to
manage business operations effectively; secondly, if a business has grown
through acquisition, the merged entity will also need to successfully integrate the
legacy systems and processes utilized in the separate businesses.
So, while the Finance Director remains intimately connected to the financial
position of the business, he continues to face the challenge of finding ways to
enhance overall performance across all operational areas of the organization.
The simple truth is that key management information is frequently locked within
departmental “silos” – a huge range of disparate information systems within
varied functions of the business. The ability to gain a fast and accurate
snapshot of performance becomes a time-consuming, inefficient and costly
exercise in generating reports, many of which are out of date by the time the
report is received and do not contain the most critical and relevant data on which
to base important business decisions.
Connecting silos of information to achieve performance excellence
Reviewing business performance is central to understanding which areas the
business needs to improve and the specific actions you must take to remain
competitive and profitable. But with each department running their own data
systems, which work well and represent a significant investment in time, training
and money to the business, is there a faster way to connect these silos of
information and realize the value of the data they contain?
Imagine that one of your clients calls your helpdesk team repeatedly during the
course of week, with a range of different queries and issues about your product.
The client has a support contract with you, but as your helpdesk system is not
connected to your accounts software, help-desk staff are unaware that the client
2 Credit Control
The Role of Business Intelligence Dashboards in Financial Management
has an unpaid invoice outstanding for six months and, therefore, has breached
the terms of their support agreement.
Business Intelligence (BI) dashboards enable senior managers to see what is
going on in parts of the business they would not normally have sight of, by
enabling disparate information within existing systems to be consolidated and
presented in a single, graphical, easy-to-understand dashboard view. The
inherent customisability of BI dashboads also enables different end-users to
view the information most meaningful to them in a variety of graphical formats,
even if the source data is not stored within their own department’s systems. For
example, a Finance Director can view key financial data such as cashflow,
creditors and debtors, but also sales against target and sales by product, total
hours billed and resource utilisation, and advertising expenditure. The ability to
instantly gain access to a holistic snapshot of organizational performance
provides a demonstrable advantage over the reams of lengthy, unintelligable
and quick to outdate reports typically produced for financial reporting
requirements.
Key benefits of implementing a business intelligence dashboard
The most intuitive dashboard solutions enable the Finance Director to quickly
and easily respond to the three most critical questions he’s likely to face:
A business intelligence dashboard provides proactive alerts to potential
shortfalls in performance, such as variances to cashflow projections, issues with
debtors and creditors, or potential threats to projected turnover or profitability. By
consolidating information from a range of existing data sources including
accounting tools, ERP systems, spreadsheets, CRM, HR and other business
software, business intelligence dashboards provide a more holistic, singular
viewpoint of performance. This “at-a-glance” perspective not only enables
corrective steps to be taken quickly when performance dips below stated
metrics, but it also highlights opportunities and positive trends. Finally, business
intelligence dashboards provide the ability to drill-down through the data to the
root cause of potential issues with just a few quick and simple mouse-clicks.
In real-terms, there are numerous immediate benefits for the Finance team from
the use of a BI dashboard:
3 Credit Control
The Role of Business Intelligence Dashboards in Financial Management
•
•
Increase the speed of your budgeting process and the relevance of your
budget.
Prepare forecasts faster, with greater insight and accuracy.
1.
2.
3.
How are we doing against stated metrics?
Why are we on- or off-track? and
What actions do we need to take today?
4 Credit Control
The Role of Business Intelligence Dashboards in Financial Management
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Ensure realistic results and improved performance when plans, budgets,
and forecasts all work seamlessly with each other.
Account for one-time or unusual events that can skew results and plans.
Generate effective plans without statistical expertise.
Reduce reliance on one-off spreadsheets for budgets, plans, and reports.
Decrease the time spent on planning, budgeting, and forecasting cycles.
Gain better insight into company performance and the factors that drive
the business.
Be more efficient at analysis.
Improve decision-making.
Produce more reliable information to help drive better results.
Case study: Concorde IT Group
Concorde IT Group provides award-winning managed IT and IT infrastructure services
designed to cover the entire lifecycle of an organization’s IT systems from consultancy,
design and implementation, to ongoing support and management.
The company quickly acquired a business shortly after formation in 1985, and has
acquired a further three companies since 2008. Continuing to focus on growth through
acquisition, Concorde IT Group’s senior management team is actively researching
complimentary businesses to acquire and has an aggressive growth target to double in
size by 2013.
As a result of their growth strategy, the management team faced a number of significant
obstacles to improving their overall business performance. With a defined objective of
realising better financial insight from the existing systems, the senior management team,
led by Chief Executive Officer Colin Meakin, decided to implement a corporate-wide
business intelligence (BI) solution, based on Intuitive Dashboards from Intuitive Business
Intelligence.
The company’s recent acquisitions meant that they had three entirely different accounting
and sales order processing (SOP) systems in place, which they wanted to consolidate as
a single, accurate viewpoint of the company’s financial position at any given time. In
addition, they operated a range of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and help-
desk systems, which they also intended to connect together.
By implementing Intuitive Dashboards across their accounting and SOP systems, the
senior management team have been able to resolve the issue of not knowing how the
acquired companies are performing. According to Colin Meakin, “We experienced the
pain of not knowing how well our acquired companies were doing; unless we were
prepared to train on the acquired, often legacy, systems, which isn’t practical or cost-
efficient, we needed a fast solution. Intuitive Dashboards fixed this pain in an instant with
no training required.”
5 Credit Control
The Role of Business Intelligence Dashboards in Financial Management
This article first appeared in CREDIT CONTROL JOURNAL (incorporating Asset & Risk Review),
Volume 32 Number 5 & 6 2011
Published by:
House of Words Limited
7 Greding Walk, Hutton, Brentwood, Essex, CM13 2UF UK
Website: www.creditcontrol.co.uk
© 2011 House of Words Ltd
Meakin continues, “If you know how much you’re selling, how much profit you’re making
or conversely, how much you’re not selling or how much profit you’re not making, you can
take the steps you need – cut costs, boost sales – to achieve the profitability you’ve set
as your target. And the profitability provides the means for us to invest more heavily in
enhancing our brand and maintain exceptional client satisfaction. With Intuitive
Dashboards, we have our finger on the pulse of our business and it’s a dynamic reading;
we don’t have to wait for management accounts to be published to tell us how well we’re
performing.”
Concorde IT Group’s implementation of Intuitive Dashboards links seamlessly to their
existing data systems, MS Dynamics, Sage, CRM, help-desk systems and numerous
spreadsheets, presenting a consolidate view of the most important business data in the
right amount of detail and in an easy-to-use graphical format.
Meakin concludes, “We’ve realised fast ROI from our implementation. Now, we’re no
longer driving the business whilst looking in the rear view mirror, as Intuitive Dashboards
allows us to see over the horizon and take fast, corrective action.”
BI: a must for financial management success
An effective BI dashboard solution is a “must have” in today’s financial
environment. Companies in all industries are using BI dashboards to enhance
their decision-making processes across all functions. With the extended
responsibilities placed on the FD, dashboards represent a cost-effective, fast to
implement solution that can deliver “quick wins” by leveraging existing
investments in varied data systems across all operational teams to provide real-
time insight into an organization’s business and financial position.
doc_433106354.pdf