In the digital era, finance isn’t a business function. It’s a business partner. Executives are looking to CFOs for data-based insights that propel the business forward. They’re calling on the finance team to be the organisation’s “analytics powerhouse,” driving the analytics agenda for the business. Creating your P&Ls, sending reports and taking care of all the manual processes that exist within the Finance function can be time consuming and inefficient. This can hold you back from what’s important, analysing the numbers.
For businesses to thrive, finance, accounting and reporting departments must deliver accurate and actionable insights from finance data. Here are four ways that Qlik Sense can help to make your Finance team more efficient and data-driven:
1. Automate to save time
Multiple systems and data complexity make the financial reporting process labour and time-intensive. Qlik Sense’s automated reporting and alerting capabilities gives your users the freedom to explore, analyse, and speed up the reporting process whilst reducing your financial burden. Alerting enables your Finance Team to spot anomalies and outliers helping to monitor costs and stick to budget. Act faster with finance data-driven alerts to define conditions based on measures or dimensions of the data that you want to monitor.
2. Reduce errors and risk
Many finance teams rely on spreadsheets like Excel to analyse data. As convenient as this seems, it introduces many challenges. With spreadsheets, people spend about 80% of their time manually extracting and prepping data and only 20% analysing it. And layering on additional visualisation tools just adds another step to this process. Further, this ungoverned process can often introduce inaccurate data, which reduces confidence in the analysis.
Qlik automates and accelerates data integration and prep, empowering finance teams to focus their time exploring trusted, governed data using powerful analytics to uncover hidden insights they can’t find with spreadsheets.
3. Interrogate the data
Imagine viewing last quarter’s largest cost variances, then pivoting to identify the factors that drove them. Or, suppose you could see the relative IRR of your top five product lines over the past two years, and instantly shift your view based on geography, distribution model, or any other factors to gain deeper insight. With Qlik, you can always learn more by simply asking “Why?”.
Qlik’s powerful Associative Engine lets you combine multiple, complex sources of data that can be explored in any direction. Analyse financial performance, develop forecasts and run highly flexible financial simulations.
4. Find insights easier
Insight Advisor Chat in Qlik Sense allows you to ask questions in a conversational manner then dive directly into search-based visual analysis for deeper insight and exploration. With conversational analytics, more people – especially less sophisticated users – can embrace analytics using natural language, giving them a faster and easier way to ask questions of data, gain insights, and make data-driven decisions. Rather than having to search between apps and dashboards to find the right data; the tool uses the context from your question to quickly locate the right data. Making it easier for users to be empowered by data, wherever they are and whenever they want. Qlik Insight Advisor Chat can also be integrated with Microsoft Teams, Slack, Salesforce and Skype, as well as interacting vocally with possible Amazon Alexa integration, making data a part of every conversation.