Financial analytics involves the analysis of financial data to assess the viability and profitability of a business. It also provides valuable insights when evaluating and planning particular business activities such as new projects, expansions or potential mergers and acquisitions.
Financial analytics solutions help organizations gain an in-depth understanding of their finances, take strategic actions to improve business performance, and forecast future revenue and profitability. With a better understanding of their finances, organizations can improve cash flow, manage assets more effectively and improve profitability and shareholder value.
What are the benefits of using financial analytics?
The emergence of new business models, new technologies and an increasingly competitive business landscape make financial analytics solutions essential for most organizations. Enterprises now compete based on the speed, quality and agility of their financial data analytics and decision-making.
Financial analytics is typically conducted by analysts within an organization’s finance department. Analysts typically need to draw data from multiple financial, operational and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Financial analytics can span multiple disciplines and business functions. Some of the specific types of analysis commonly performed include:
- Accounts payable analytics
- Cash-to-cash cycle analytics
- Fixed asset analytics
- General ledger analytics
- Accounts receivable analytics
- Procure-to-pay (P2P) analytics
While financial analytics solutions are vital to ensuring the health and profitability of the business, many organizations struggle to gain access to the data they need and present it to decision-makers. Accessing this information has traditionally required a detailed understanding of the data schemas used in upstream business systems and complex ETL pipelines to extract, transform and load relevant information into business intelligence systems. These activities are expensive and typically require significant data engineering expertise. Using traditional approaches, generating new reports and data views required by decision-makers can take weeks or even months.
Incorta’s self-service financial analytics solution
Fortunately, there is now a better way to deploy a full-featured financial analytics solution. Incorta’s Direct Data Platform™ can provide analysts with self-service access to the latest financial data and complete end-to-end visibility to an organization’s finances. Incorta provides analysts and decision-makers with access to prebuilt, intuitive reports and dashboards. It also gives organizations the means to acquire, enrich and analyze their financial data with unmatched speed, simplicity and fidelity.
Using Incorta, financial analysts can leverage prebuilt integrations with popular financial and ERP systems such as Oracle, NetSuite and SAP to securely access and analyze financial data without impacting existing operational and reporting systems. A self-service financial analytics solution powered by Incorta enables organizations to perform faster, achieve more thorough analysis of the latest financial information to maximize on working capital, improve analysis and reporting, and make more accurate forecasts, plans and budgets to support decision-making across different lines of business.
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