How Real-Time Financial Data Can Help Drive Business Intelligence
As business managers get flooded with information from various sources, it is important to filter what is important and use that information for our benefit. Most businesses have a vast amount of data that would help improve their operations, become financially stronger, and better serve their clients. However, organizations do not always have the appropriate system or resources to collect, understand, analyze, and use this data to their competitive advantage.
Business Intelligence is the procedural and technical infrastructure that is used to collect, store, and analyze data related to any business. Business Intelligence involves data mining, process analysis, performance benchmarking, and analytics and uses this data to present metrics and reports to senior management that allows for better decision making.
Most businesses use business intelligence in some form or another, whether on an ad-hoc basis or through a more formalized structure. However, with ever-increasing technological innovations enabling quick decision-making, your organization not being on the same footing could serve as a major disadvantage.
While many believe that business intelligence is focused on customer behavior analytics, it is increasingly utilized within the finance function. Let’s explore some of the ways in which Real-time Financial data can help drive Financial Business Intelligence.
Three Ways in which Real-Time Data Helps Drive Financial Business Intelligence
1. Helps in Forecasting
One of the major functions of the Finance department is to build forecasts and using real-time financial data helps tremendously in this regard. Real-time data can be used to forecast a wide range of important business parameters including sales, inventory, marketing budgets, headcounts, and financial liquidity. Forecasting helps a business identify parameters that may be adversely impacted before it becomes a major issue and provides management with the opportunity to implement proactive measures.
2. Helps in Cash Planning and Cash Management
Lack of sufficient liquidity is one of the major reasons for businesses failing over the years. Cash Planning and Cash Management are among the most vital functions of a Finance department and real-time data can help in this regard, including visibility into cash balances and transactions that significantly influence your future cash flow.
3. Understanding the competitive landscape
Using real-time data to track the competitive landscape can assist in preparing to challenge the competition and gain market share or a business edge.
Besides this, business intelligence solutions can also help you in specific areas such as:
- Understand customer trending patterns
- Measure marketing campaign effectiveness
- Analyze and improve operational performance
- Organize data and create reports for regulatory compliance
Different types of Data Analytics
Let’s now look at some of the types of analytics that are popular and can help an organization use their data to their advantage.
- Descriptive Analytics
Descriptive analytics refers to the type of data analysis that is used to answer a question. It allows business owners and stakeholders to understand what has been happening within the business and how it may impact future outcomes.
- Diagnostic Analytics
When you already know what’s happening within the business but want to identify the reasons or factors that are affecting it rather than just being satisfied with the information available from descriptive analytics, then diagnostic analytics is a viable option. Diagnostic analytical tools can help to drill down deeper into the data for answers to questions like “Why does this happen at all?”
- Predictive Analytics
Predictive Analytics is based on the results of descriptive and diagnostic analytics and is used to find answers about the future. It predicts the effect previous trends or patterns will have on future outcomes.
- Prescriptive Analytics
Prescriptive analytics provides a solution for the point in time when the outcomes from descriptive, diagnostic, and predictive models are known. Prescriptive analytics utilizes these answers to help determine the best course of action to be taken. This type of analysis can be used to advise users about possible outcomes and what they should do to maximize their key business metrics.
- Cognitive Analytics
Cognitive analytics combines several intelligent technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine-learning algorithms, and deep learning to apply human brain-like intelligence for certain tasks. Essentially, cognitive analytics is inspired by how the human brain processes data, draws conclusions and codifies instinctive experiences into learning and understanding both the words within the text and also its full context.
How can Axletree’s Insights Solution help?
Insights by Axletree (R) is the Financial Business Intelligence solution that leverages all these methodologies and can help an organization convert their data into actionable intelligence that will help to improve their internal performances and gain a competitive edge.
Insights, a cloud-based, data source-neutral platform, leverages Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics to provide an organization with a 360-degree view of its operational and financial metrics.
Insights are enabled to connect with Axletree’s connectivity, payment transformation and processing, cash and bank management, compliance, and finance solutions. It uses the data across the entire Axletree ecosystem to convert it into intelligent information that can help identify key patterns and trends, which will aid senior management in making better and more informed decisions.
Insights can help your organization in the following areas:
- Analyzing performance patterns and trends
- Deep data exploration
- Easy configuration
- Mobile access
- Artificial Intelligence and machine learning models
- Multilingual Interface
- Multi-format exports
- Minimizing your IT footprint
If you are looking for a financial data business intelligence solution for your organization, visit our website at www.axletree.com or contact us at info@axletree.com
May 6, 2022
