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Business Intelligence for the Finance Department

Finance is one of the core functions of any organisation, and provides many of the key indicators of the health (or otherwise) of your business.

We can help:

  • Make your finance staff more productive, spending more time analyzing information and less time producing it.
  • Build BI solutions and data warehouses that source from many enterprise ERP packages, including JD Edwards, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Technology One, Oracle Financials, and PeopleSoft etc.
  • Automate Balance Sheet and P&L report production.
  • Measure organisational performance against key financial KPI’s, target, and budget.
  • Forecast future performance based on current and historical performance.
  • Do in-depth analysis on Assets, Liabilities, Purchasing, Invoicing, GL, AP, and AR.
  • The chart of accounts keeps evolving. See ‘As At’ views of GL and chart of accounts, as at a point in time, and cast to the current chart of account.
  • Enable reporting and analysis of finance data across other business processes including sales, operations, HR etc
  • Provide financial reporting broken down by organisational hierarchy, product, division or any other relevant breakdown.
  • Enable fast month end reporting.
  • View information by multiple fiscal calendars.
  • Measure financial KPIs against budget, targets and benchmarks on a daily/monthly/annual etc. basis.
  • Reduce your risks of reliance on Excel spread sheets, and key individuals.
  • Ensure everyone is working with the same data based on common definitions and metrics.
  • Allow other divisions/units to analyse financial information relevant to them, curated by finance, but self-service, reducing their dependency on the finance department for information production.
  • Deliver timely information on a daily or weekly basis, allowing for proactive action to be taken to affect monthly and quarterly results.
  • Implement financial budgeting, planning, forecasting and consolidations.
  • Handle multiple currencies.

Case Study

Hans Smallgoods was heavily reliant on email and excel spread sheets built by individual accountants for its financial management and reporting. This resulted in a large, difficult to understand spread sheets being circulated throughout the team and the rest of the organisation. End of month processing took too long, and there was little feedback on the daily and weekly level. Often these spread sheets did not match, and created confusion. There were also instances of key individuals retiring and leaving behind critical spread sheets that only they understood. Hans recognized the need to modernize their financial reporting capabilities.

A financial business Intelligence solution based on a Data Warehouse was developed for Hans Smallgoods. The data Warehouse centralized data processing and provided common definitions for metrics.

Beginning with a full history of GL transactions and periodic balance snapshots, the application provided for deep dive analysis and drill downs to purchasing, invoicing, AP and AR. It was possible to analyse information by each segment of the GL, providing targeted information to other areas of the organization. Further breakdowns were possible by client, product, supplier, manufacturing and sales where applicable.

The application allowed accounting staff to organize the chart of accounts into reporting hierarchies for specific reports, and more general hierarchies over each segment. This standardized reporting across the enterprise.

Finance and other staff were able to generate self-service ad-hoc analysis of information, and augment that with their own formulas in Excel.

Also intelligent historical versioning of hierarchies was used to provide an ‘as at’ point in time view of the chart of account.

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