There is a growing demand for analytic driven decision making that takes into account all business functions and processes for a holistic overview that aids business intelligence, eliminating any risk of errors. While there is no shortage of data, it can be an overwhelming task to go through every financial record, customer file, project and inventory detail for any organisation looking to scale. With a highly functional and fully automated ERP like NetSuite you can not only easily manage all your systems from one place, but you can take a deep dive into analytics and take advantage of tools for producing reports, creating dashboards, and tracking key performance indicators.
Whether you are a business looking to grow or a Multi-National Company looking to scale further, ensuring that your financial analytics and reporting are standardised and up to date is crucial in order for you to boost performance.
With almost half a year now gone, here’s a checklist of indicators that might signal you need to up your financial analytics and reporting game.
1. Rigid Report Templates That Are Predefined
Most ERP software providers and accounting systems offer pre-formatted templates that can be used while producing financial statements and other standard reports. Additionally, most systems also include reports for modules like warehouse management or manufacturing. Most companies have pre-defined report format, which is not always compatible with other systems and organisations. Furthermore, it is not unusual for board of directors or internal leads to want tailored financial statements for review and reporting.
For the same, changing the layout or including additional data elements on a report should be simple, but it is not, since the hard coded designs can be often difficult to modify. This is not only time consuming but makes reporting and analysis a tiring to arrive at. (Interested in better reporting capability…click here)
2. Limiting Tools That Don’t Allow You To Customize Reports
With various business functions running, it is inevitable that customised reports that focus on one product or unit will be required for review from time-to-time. Usually, this is created by the IT department who possess advanced training and skills that populate it in the desired format. While this may have worked for traditional businesses earlier, building custom reports is labour intensive and time consuming. This may be unacceptable when your business needs to be high-functioning at all times, especially when it comes to extrapolating data and analytics for informed decision making. Spreadsheets based reports while accurate, are limiting and must be continuously updated. A catch 22 when you consider the inherent risk of insecure modifications where a single change in a formula can have significant consequences.
3. Data Is Inaccessible And Difficult to Unify
Centralised access to data from various departments makes it easy for a company to engage in macro or micro analysis of a given product at one location in comparison to others. When you are using separate systems or spreadsheets, to capture information at one place is impossible. For instance, it is highly likely that your analytics solution may have access to one source of data, while another departments data may be inaccessible due to a different architecture. The ease of navigation of a unified platform is critical to real time analytics and performance in the long run.
4. Limiting Industry-Specific KPIs
Key Performance Indictors are important for organisations and departments to meet their objectives and flag anything that may be unachievable. Like customised reporting, KPIs customised to specific industries help set goals, specific to them. If the inbuilt analytic tool in your ERP system does not support KPIs necessary to your targets, you will never know if your performance is meeting targets—a concern that can be a setback for your future growth.
5. Dashboards That Cannot Be Tailored To Specific Roles
Dashboards allow a complete overview of what KPIs need to be taken into account and all pending tasks that need to be addressed. With everything in one place they are essential to smooth running of your department or organisation. In order to stay focussed on the role at hand, employees should be able to easily customise their dashboard and eliminate any room for error or overlaps. Difficult to tailor dashboards make it harder to access critical to your business insights.
With NetSuite’s inbuilt financial analytics and reporting, you are in control of your business and can configure it easily to suit your evolving needs. About time to upgrade to a better way to boost your performance?
If you are interested in getting better visibility into your business and curious if NetSuite might be a good fit for your needs,
Schedule an exploratory discussion
What can you expect from this discussion?
- You will know rather quickly if NetSuite is right for your growth plans.
- Get an idea of which business challenges NetSuite can address for you.
- Understand and analyse how you can get to know your numbers easily.
- Get a fair idea of efficiencies to be gained by using NetSuite for your business
- Understand how disparate functions of your business can be managed on a single platform.
