Your financial data will give up deeper decision-making secrets if you interrogate it deeper.
It’s amazing, the journey you undergo in the course of helping clients achieve financial-reporting efficiency—or perhaps that should be helping clients hone their ‘data-to-decisions’ performance mindset.
That’s really the transition we’ve made, and that’s really the distinction that sums up how FinWorx for Accpac and Syspro has changed from a once-humble financial-reporting tool to a fully-fledged enterprise performance management platform that it’s rapidly becoming.
Developing FinWorx in that direction has given us a high-resolution view of how large-scale businesses today can get the most from their financial data.
We’d like to share some of those insights here.
A deeper understanding of ‘data is the new oil’
The ‘data is the new oil’ mantra has become something of a meme.
How it’s typically read is in the sense of ‘data is desirable, tradeable, mineable and therefore valuable. Like oil.
It’s a smart analogy; however, what it lacks is a deeper appreciation of the nature of ‘crude’ data that must undergo some sort of refinement that unlocks its fullest utility.
Asking more of your financial data
Once you begin to understand how ‘crude’ financial data is as useful as your ability to refine it, you can start asking more of your financial data.
Think of your financial data like a jigsaw puzzle; the more it tells you, the more it can tell you. With the right computational capacity, its revelatory capacity multiplies.
First, you start with scattered, apparently unrelated pieces of the puzzle. Each on its own can only tell you: ‘I am one single jigsaw puzzle piece’. In other words, ‘I am one single transaction or financial figure’.
As you attach other pieces to that one single piece of the financial puzzle, a picture starts to emerge.
You no longer see the pieces as an individual. You see them as an emerging ‘whole’ from which you can begin to predict, forecast and imagine yet-to-be-added parts of the ‘bigger picture’ that the puzzle is slowly forming.
It’s exactly the same with your financial data.
Thanks to the two-way relationship we’ve had with clients over the years, FinWorx has slowly grown and developed in its predictive ‘bigger picture’ capacity.
Making your data architecture flexible and uncovering gaps in the financial-data puzzle
As you learn to ask more about your financial performance, you learn that the more you ask, the more gaps emerge of things you want to find out, but can’t.
The way to solve that problem and gain the insight you sense is there (but can’t see) is by creating a flexible data architecture so that it can reveal more, and uncover what you didn’t even know was there.
That’s when you start moving from simple ‘financial-reporting’ to a ‘data-to-decisions’ approach.
How can you make your data architecture more flexible?
Improving your data-flexibility means bringing your financial-performance data out of their silos and interfacing with them as a single entity.
That’s what FinWorx gives you as a platform that began life as a financial-reporting tool, today becoming an enterprise-performance management platform.
Now you can actually drill down into the transactional level, regardless of where the data was generated. What this gives you is the agility for instant data recall and interpretation using multiple data points, no matter where those data live.
Final thought: Asking more of your financial performance
Ultimately, what you’re trying to achieve by making deeper interrogations into your financial data is to have it give up deeper decision-making secrets.
To do that well, it pays to have a data co-interrogator: someone outside of your day-to-day frame of operations who can recommend, implement and enable.
It’s partly thanks to how client partnerships have fuelled our development of FinWorx that we’ve become select Syspro implementation partners for the UK market.
Whether you’re a UK enterprise or not, we’re here to assist as your data co-interrogator and strategic partner.
Speak to us about how FinWorx can help take you toward a ‘data-to-decisions’ approach to financial business performance and we’ll have a first conversation toward making that your everyday reality.
