Finance leaders play a critical role in equipping leadership teams with accurate and timely financial information essential for making key strategic decisions. These decisions include understanding where growth is coming from, deciding where to invest, managing costs without sacrificing quality, or finding the best ways to engage with customers.
Even analysing the top ten best and worst performing suppliers, customers and products can be a demanding task. The challenge lies in producing and reconciling an ever-increasing volume of financial data spread across numerous systems and applications. This process is not only time-consuming but also hampers an organisation's agility in making swift, precise decisions. Moreover, this does not even consider the complexities involved in managing the financial processes that are required to extract, transform and produce validated data.
The Information Lab in Ireland has designed a process that can be used across organisations of all sizes to address these requirements. This is called ‘The Single View’ and is a major advance in the Financial Transformation journey.
Achieving a Single View of financial measures and key performance indicators (KPIs) across multi-entity organisations is becoming crucial to navigate this complexity effectively and addressing challenges appropriately. The Single View approach gathers financial data from different sources, applies rigorous data cleansing and validation processes to ensure data is accurate, standardised, and reconciled, and then integrates and consolidates the data into a comprehensive reporting system. This approach allows for a single view and near real-time financial reporting on specific customers, suppliers, or products. The Single View approach effectively addresses many of the data challenges faced by finance leaders today.
Today's Data Challenges Are Plenty But Not Unique
For many organisations, financial data is fragmented across multiple departments and systems, creating data silos that hinder the ability to gain a holistic view of the organisation's financial performance. Different entities within the same group often use varying definitions and calculations for financial measures and KPIs. This inconsistency leads to unreliable metrics, making it difficult to accurately compare and aggregate data. Additionally, reliance on manual data collection and reporting processes often result in errors, inefficiencies, and delays, undermining the timeliness and accuracy of financial insights.
Ultimately, fragmented and inconsistent financial data impedes strategic decision-making, as finance teams are hindered in their ability to share detailed financial insights to the wider business. The availability of such financial insights would enable business teams to make more timely and informed strategic decisions.
How a Single View Can Address Key Challenges and Drive Decision Making
The Single View approach unifies financial data by integrating, reconciling, and consolidating information from various sources into a single, accurate perspective. This unified view empowers finance teams to address critical challenges and answer key strategic questions. This is done through:
1. Streamlining Finance Processes
Automation: Leveraging automation tools for data collection, integration, and reporting reduces the reliance on manual processes. This minimises errors, increases efficiency, and ensures timely availability of financial data.
Real-Time Insights: Advanced analytics and visualisation tools provide real-time insights into financial measures and KPIs. This enables finance teams to monitor performance continuously and make informed decisions promptly.
2. Ensuring Consistent Metrics
Standardised Definitions: Implementing standardised definitions and calculations for financial measures and KPIs across the organisation ensures consistency. This enables accurate comparison and aggregation of data, providing a clear and unified understanding of financial performance.
Accurate Reporting: Consistent metrics lead to more accurate and reliable financial reporting. This enhances the credibility of financial insights and supports better decision-making at all levels of the organisation.
3. Supporting Strategic Decision-Making
Comprehensive Insights: A single view provides finance teams with comprehensive insights into revenue, costs, margins, and other critical financial metrics. This holistic understanding supports more informed and strategic decision-making.
Scenario Analysis: Integrated data enables advanced scenario analysis and forecasting. Finance teams can evaluate different business strategies and their potential impact on financial performance, supporting long-term strategic planning.
Conclusion
Adopting a Single View approach is transformative for organisations facing financial fragmentation. By streamlining finance processes, ensuring the consistency of financial metrics across the business, and ultimately supporting strategic decision-making, the Single View allows organisations to break down data silos, make more informed decisions, and drive sustainable growth.
Are you ready to eliminate financial fragmentation and drive smarter decision-making in your organisation? Connect with our experts at The Information Lab Ireland today for an initial conversation to explore how the Single View approach can transform your financial processes and strategic outcomes.
Read the Customer Story. to learn how we helped our client, a global healthcare manufacturer, supply their Sales team with validated and reliable insight into their best sales opportunities.
A Chartered Accountant, with a background in finance and technology consultancy, Petra is passionate about data analytics, particularly from a finance perspective. She previously worked as a manager at KPMG’s management consulting arm (within finance and technology competencies), delivering finance/technology transformation projects. When asked what excites her most about her role, Petra says she enjoys having the opportunity to "enable clients to make improved and data-driven financial decisions".