Finance transformation with analytics
Laura Timms is Product Strategy Manager at MHR Analytics and a ‘data maturity’ advocate, supporting organisations to advance their data journey. Here she shares with FinTech how adopting analytics can help organisations successful undertake finance transformation.
Finance transformation is all about improving the overall value that finance provides, but with finance teams under increasing pressure to do more with less, this is something that is becoming increasingly difficult.
It’s estimated that 81% of finance teams are currently undergoing finance transformation, yet research by Gartner reveals that seven out of 10 finance transformations fail.
This article, based on the new finance analytics guide from MHR Analytics, will reveal the benefits of adopting analytics to supercharge your efforts and help ensure that your finance transformation is a successful one.
Finance strategy that’s aligned with future business needs
Transformation is more than simply hitting a financial goal. It’s about being able to respond to the current and future needs of the organisation – something that can only be achieved when finance is connected to the wider business.
Unfortunately, with all of the demand that finance teams receive, it can be easy to fail to recognise how financial activity translates into everyday business.
This can lead teams working introspectively, which can quickly translate into silos, with poor communication of information, lower levels productivity and consequently a less valuable finance team.
To prevent this from happening, the financial strategy needs to be aligned with activity across the business, and analytics provides the platform to do exactly that.
Using a data warehouse, data from across the organisation can be synced to give finance teams real-time insights into how changes in one area of the business will impact the course of action they take.
This means that finance teams are able to steer away from getting caught up in metrics like historical spend and industry benchmarks, and are instead grounded in how the finance strategy relates to the unique needs of their business.
According to Gartner, 56% of companies are in the evaluation phase of adopting AI to automate accounting & finance processes. By 2020 it’s estimated that 31% of companies will have actually implemented this into their business and 26% in “operating” mode, where AI is actively used in accounting & finance processes.
But what does this mean for finance transformation?
Well, AI technology is providing a platform that is changing the role of finance teams at a rapid pace. Through automating tedious financial processes, finance teams no longer have to spend their time buried in spreadsheets.
