Is your organization extracting the full value of its financial data? It doesn’t matter how much raw data your business collects or how many data analytics tools you use if you can’t effectively organize, interpret, and draw actionable insights from your financial data.
Most people in your organization will not have the data analytics or science background to handle these complex data tasks independently. However, financial data visualization tools can make it easy for anyone in your organization to analyze data and eliminate data silos.
This post will explain what financial data visualization is and why it is beneficial to organizations. The right financial data visualization tool can help your team make better financial decisions and promptly act on time-sensitive financial data.
What Is Financial Data Visualization?
Financial data visualization is the method of pictorially representing financial data like income and expenses, profits and losses, assets and liabilities, and equity. Financial data visualization examples include charts, tables, graphs, diagrams, etc.
Financial data visualizations give stakeholders and finance teams a visual representation of important data to help them identify trends and make informed decisions. Data visualization tools transform raw data into charts and graphs that are easy to understand.
The core function of financial data visualizations is to make data from financial statements and other data sources more accessible and actionable.
The ideal data visualization tool will also help educate your team and build your team’s data visualization skills. Improving your team’s data visualization competencies will strengthen financial reports and data analytics efforts.
The Benefits of Financial Data Visualization
Now that you know more about financial data visualization, it is vital to understand the benefits it can provide your organization. Data visualization software can provide the following benefits to your organization:
- Improve decision-making
- Reduce errors
- View the big picture
- Set better goals
- Improve marketing efforts
- Identify trends
Improve Decision-Making
When making critical business decisions, sometimes speed is vital to success. However, acting on real-time information and emerging trends is difficult if you can’t understand the data.
Data visualization improves decision-making by enabling stakeholders to connect the dots between discrete data sets and quickly identify emerging trends.
As a result, decision-making is improved since leaders have more time to make decisions with less time spent parsing data and analyzing numbers on a spreadsheet.
Reduce Errors
Data visualization tools reduce the risk of errors in manual calculations and analysis. A data visualization tool will not make a calculation error.
Of course, data can be incorrectly entered into the tool, but when your organization utilizes data visualization software, it eliminates a significant area of potential error.
Errors in calculation or analysis can be disastrous if your business relies on this data to make important decisions. Therefore it is critical to minimize the risk of error as much as possible.
View the Big Picture
Data visualization makes it easy for leaders to see the big picture. Financial data visualization tools allow leaders to visualize data from multiple data sets simultaneously.
Trying to get a view of this data manually is difficult, especially when there is a mix of financial and non-financial data. However, with an eye on the bigger picture, stakeholders can gain valuable insights that a single dataset likely won’t be able to provide.
Since an organization’s data is often interconnected in several ways, getting an overview of the big picture is extremely helpful to business leaders and financial planners.
Set Better Goals
Financial data visualization can help your organization set better goals. In addition, gaining a deeper understanding of your data makes it easier to make predictions and forecasts about the future.
As a result, your organization can set more realistic financial targets and focus on achieving reasonable goals. Setting better goals helps your organization focus on critical tasks and efforts and also helps improve team morale.
If you are struggling to meet your goals, the issue might be the goals you are setting. Creating data visualizations can help your business target impactful, achievable goals.
Improve Marketing Efforts
Data is often a strong marketing tool, especially when comparing your organization, product, or service offering to a competitor with real data. However, if your internal teams struggle with numbers and raw data, how do you think your target audience will do?
Data visualization can be used to create compelling graphics and charts for marketing efforts. When customers can visualize the differences between products or services, they are more likely to retain data information.
With data visualization, consumers can also quickly compare products and services. If the data shows that your organization offers a superior product or service, it is important to present that information to customers in the simplest and most effective way.
Identify Trends
Identifying trends and patterns is difficult when looking at raw data and numbers on a spreadsheet. Financial data visualizations make it easy to spot trends and anomalies in your data. When trends can be identified, they can be acted upon.
Organizations that don’t use data visualization have more difficulty quickly spotting trends. If your business wants to get the most value out of its financial data, data visualization is the most effective way to do so.
Final Thoughts
Financial data visualization is very helpful to organizations. There are several different tools and software solutions available. The best way to choose a data visualization solution is to understand the needs of your organization and carefully review each option’s features.
If you are interested in learning more about financial data visualization, FinTech development, or anything else related to financial technology, contact an experienced FinTech app development partner like Koombea.
