How to drive strategy and performance with data-driven decision-making

The top 5 actions of successful finance leaders

1. Become a Data-Driven Strategist

To do this requires the combined strengths of people, processes, and technology.

2. Free up your time, via automation, to focus on what’s important

Finance leaders understand that automating standard accounting tasks enables more strategic decision-making. That’s why 85% plan to invest in process automation. (Source: Armanino LLP, “CFO Evolution 2.0, The Path to the Transformational CFO,” October 2017)

3. Go beyond the GAAP with data you can slice and dice

Data-driven financial services firms make the General Ledger (GL) the center of their data strategy.

The GL already contains the key financial information needed to create GAAP financial reports, including an organisation’s income statement, balance sheet, and financial ratios. By enhancing the GL with non-GAAP statistical data, financial services firms can track and report on key metrics that reflect your organisation’s success in accomplishing your corporate goals.

The multi-dimensional analysis brings together your financial data with important operational data to give wider visibility across your organisation.

4. Twitterise your chart of accounts

Being able to slice and dice your data (a.k.a., adding Dimensions) to your Chart of Accounts creates simplicity and richer contextual data.

Think of Dimensions, within your Chart of Accounts, like hashtags on Twitter. Dimensions make it easy to search, sort, and organize your data for reporting with context that is meaningful for your specific financial services firm.

Just as you can look at hashtags over time, you can analyse your financial reports over time. Just as you can view real-time trending Twitter statistics, you can analyze your financial performance across one or multiple entities in a real-time financial dashboard.

Sage Intacct dimensionality lets you organise information by the attributes that matter most to your firm—fair market value, net asset value, cash-on-cash performance, and more. Dimensions help you perform a more meaningful analysis of your firm’s performance.

Data-driven customer success story

Brookfield builds an agile foundation for dynamic business

Challenges before
• Required central administration and IT maintenance
• Complicated reporting workarounds
• Cumbersome and inefficient accounting workflows
• Paper-based processes

Gains with Sage Intacct
• Cut monthly close process in half
• Gained granular departmental insights for better planning
• Informed vendor negotiations to lower costs
• Software paid for itself in <6 months

“In an environment of both organic and inorganic growth, it’s crucial to have a financial management system that can adapt to our changes simply and easily. Sage Intacct lets us onboard clients, assets under management, and entire new entities without IT support, providing a flexible foundation with which to grow the business.”

Kyle O’Connor, Vice President of Finance & Accounting, Brookfield Public Securities

Other customer quotes

“We chose Sage Intacct over other cloud software on the market because it was built as a solid multi-ledger accounting system with sophisticated financial controls and flexible reporting–all seamlessly integrated with Salesforce.”

Sabry Mohideen, CFO, Marathon Ventures

“When compared with the limited data we had before, the level of information we can access in Sage Intacct is like night and day. Now, we have key information such as gross margins by customer and business line at our fingertips. Since these crucial business metrics are no longer a mystery, we can create more realistic projections and make better day-to-day decisions. Our board has been impressed by the new business insight we provide to them.”

Kristy Facchini, CFO, Auto Claims Direct

Decisions with insights

Real-time multi-dimensional analysis of key reports.

Build role-based dashboards that put financial and operational metrics at your fingertips. Filter data by any dimension to obtain the key results you need for analysis. Take in the high-level view, then drill down to explore opportunities/issues or dig deeper into details.

Integrations

5. Get all of your data in real-time, in one place

Sage Intacct was designed to make it easy for financial services firms to synthesise information from many data sources for more informed analysis and decision-making.

Sage Intacct Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) were designed for real-time integration. Our APIs don’t require you to wait for accounting to post the entries. APIs power our best-in-class ecosystem with prebuilt connectors to popular business systems like Salesforce for example. Sage Intacct puts all your data in one place—not just financials—but also sales, planning, payroll data, and any other information you need to drive strategic analysis.

Take the lead in Financial Leadership 3.0

The pace of evolution in leading-edge technologies like artificial intelligence and advanced analytics is quickly accelerating.

Now is the time to push your organisation to adopt a more data-driven strategy. Have you hired the right people, built the right culture, and streamlined critical processes? Does your technology generate meaningful, real-time insights or backward-looking reports? Sage Intacct delivers a rapid transition to Financial Leadership 3.0. Financial services firms benefit quickly from these capabilities:

1. Automation eliminates manual data entry and spreadsheets to close the books faster.
2. Real-time reporting enables proactive response to changing conditions.
3. Aggregate data from disparate sources improves analysis.
4. Role-based dashboards drive decision-making.

Sage Intacct makes it easier to carve out executive time for focused, strategic analysis. With a single source of truth and better visibility across the organisation, you will be well-positioned to take advantage of Financial Leadership 3.0 innovations.

Sage Intacct is the AICPA’s preferred provider of cloud financial applications

Sage Intacct is the #1 cloud financial management system for financial services, including the world’s largest wealth and asset management firms. It is the solution of choice for nearly 700 financial services organisations that collectively manage more than $1.3T of assets under management.

Contact us at Akuna Solutions and explore with a Sage Intacct implementation specialist how to leverage the most modern technology available today to support your organisation’s mission. 

Photo by Hunters Race on Unsplash