Unlocking the full potential of the financial data your organization collects requires financial business intelligence tools. Modern organizations are flush with operational data, historical data, financial data, and customer data.
However, many organizations fail to analyze data effectively and draw on the full potential of data analysis to improve operational efficiency and financial performance.
Financial business intelligence software can help your organization’s finance department improve data management and glean actionable insights from financial data.
This post will explain what financial business intelligence is and the benefits it can provide organizations that adopt these tools.
What Is Financial Business Intelligence?
Financial business intelligence is a term that is used to describe the collection, processing, and analysis of financial data in real time from data management tools such as a centralized data warehouse.
Financial business intelligence software expedites and improves the decision-making process. But, when it comes to capitalizing on current market trends, your organization doesn’t always have time to wait.
Financial business intelligence software enables finance departments and CFOs to predict customer behavior and market conditions with powerful predictive analytics.
Is Financial Business Intelligence Different Than Business Intelligence?
You might have heard the term business intelligence (BI). Business intelligence is technology that enables organizations to identify and visualize key performance indicators through analytics to improve decision-making.
Finance business intelligence software is merely specialized business intelligence software. The truth is finance teams can use the same BI tools as every other facet of your business. However, financial business intelligence solutions are developed to be easier for finance professionals to use.
While there is little difference in the capabilities between business intelligence systems and finance business intelligence software, your organization might consider using a specialized tool built specifically for finance teams to access pre-built templates and solutions for tasks like:
- Revenue management
- Balance sheet management
- Cash flow management
- Financial reporting
- Etc.
The Benefits of Utilizing Business Intelligence in Finance
There are several organizational benefits to using business intelligence (BI) tools. The top benefits your organization can expect to unlock when using these solutions include the following:
- Better decision-making
- Increased profitability
- Time-saving
- Reduced risk
- Increased security
- Gain a competitive advantage
Better Decision-Making
The top benefit of business intelligence is improved decision-making. BI solutions help organizations make strategic decisions that are driven by data.
Business intelligence solutions can help your organization track all financial activities in real time, assess current market conditions, weigh current credit risk, and analyze how a potential financial strategy will affect cash flow, profit, etc.
Often decisions must be made quickly to capitalize on opportunities. Business intelligence makes data analysis far more accurate and, most of all, efficient.
Increased Profitability
Business intelligence software can help your company realize greater profits by finding patterns and trends in your organization’s data. With the insights generated from BI solutions, your organization can adjust its tactics and market strategies to gain new customers.
In addition, BI software can help your company extract the most value from current customers by helping your organization optimize its offerings and upsell services and products.
Increasing profits can also be achieved by reducing costs. Business intelligence solutions can help your company maximize its resources and processes to ensure that wasted costs do not affect profits.
Time-Saving
Manual data collection, analysis, and reporting are laborious processes. As a result, your finance team has less time to develop creative strategies to grow the business and generate more revenue.
Business Intelligence is a time-saving tool that simplifies data collection, analysis, and reporting. Extract the data your organization needs quickly, and free up valuable time that would otherwise be spent manually cleaning, entering, and analyzing data.
Being able to create, store, manage, and analyze your business’s annual report with the help of automated tools is a possibility for organizations of all sizes. So rather than being available only to big companies with vast resources, even smaller firms can now justify embracing these technologies and the advantages they bring along with them.
Reduced Risk
Manual data processing will generally lead to entry and other errors. Of course, humans make mistakes, which is natural and foreseeable. However, when data entry or other errors affect decision-making, the results can be disastrous.
Business intelligence reduces the risk of data errors through automation. BI solutions are far less likely to make errors in processing and entering data. In addition, they can recognize patterns that elude most humans and deliver actionable insights based on them.
Big data has made manual data entry a risk that most businesses cannot afford to take. Business intelligence solutions reduce this risk to nearly zero.
Increased Security
Business intelligence tools can improve the security of your financial activities by quickly spotting fraudulent or suspicious activity. But unfortunately, an influx of activity combined with digital platforms means there are plenty of opportunities for bad actors inside and outside your organization to commit fraudulent activities.
Business Intelligence can quickly spot and shut down fraudulent and suspicious financial activities before processing. This allows your organization to review questionable activities and approve legitimate actions without worry.
Digital security should be a primary concern for every organization, especially regarding its finances.
Gain a Competitive Advantage
Business intelligence tools can give your organization a competitive advantage in the market. But, unfortunately, gaining an edge over the competition is not always simple. Still, with a robust BI solution, your business can make smarter decisions faster and capitalize on market conditions in real-time before your competitors can pivot.
Don’t settle for second place. Your organization can gain a valuable advantage when it uses financial business intelligence solutions to identify opportunities and craft strategies.
Final Thoughts
Financial business intelligence is something that every business should know about. The right tools can help your organization maximize profits and operate more efficiently. There is too much data in modern business to attempt manual processing.
If you want to learn more about business intelligence and its impact on your organization’s financial performance, contact a development partner with FinTech, Machine Learning, and business intelligence experience like Koombea.
