At every point in a company’s journey, greater and faster access to insights can help generate new business, and improve profitability. And one of the key business strategies that organizations across industries bank on is financial analytics.
The time-growth trajectory is a powerful framework that can help businesses identify the growth stage they’re in, and then map their financial analytics strategy to it. It breaks down a business’ journey into 5 stages, and plots it against growth and time.
In this blog, we’re considering the case of a company that services cars, and how financial analytics is empowering this business at every stage of growth. We’ve used two business enablers here, namely Zoho Analytics and Zoho Books, for this demonstration.
Moment of truth
This is the phase where the business gears up for growth and, at this stage, it’s crucial to have deep financial insights to prepare for the journey ahead. This degree of granularity on financial metrics may not be possible with traditional finance.
The best solution here is a robust financial ecosystem. And one example of this kind of ecosystem can be deployed by integrating Zoho Books with Zoho Analytics in a few simple steps.
As an outcome of this integration, businesses get instant access to an exhaustive collection of prebuilt finance reports and dashboards. Insights on sales, purchases, receivables, payables, and many more, are available for immediate consumption. This adds a layer of granularity to your finance metrics, to get started with your growth journey.
Business expansion
Having had its moment of truth, the business is now venturing into the sale of new and pre-owned cars. 3 organizations get created in Zoho Books for their 3 businesses (service, new car sales, and pre-owned car sales).
Though it may be easy to manage their finances independently, within the respective organization, it’s important to assess your financial metrics holistically. By consolidating these multiple organizations, you can analyze the financial impact businesses have on each other and on your overall performance.
Above is the consolidated P&L statement. Based on your business needs, you can also consolidate and analyze your balance sheet, key financial metrics like revenue, expenses, and many more, from multiple organizations in Zoho Books. We’ve explained the consolidation of some key financial reports in one of our webinars. Watch now.
Unified business insights
Having expanded, the company starts adopting multiple applications, along with their existing finance software, to run the business. It can be CRM software, ad platforms, help desk, or any application depending on the business’ needs. However, there may be little or no interaction between these apps, leading to data and analytical silos.
Companies need a system that can fetch, blend, and powerfully analyze data from multiple sources for cross-functional insights. This can help them understand the interdependencies between financial and non-financial metrics at a much deeper level.
This dashboard blends sales data from a CRM application with finance data from Zoho Books. With this analysis, the company can understand the financial impact of sales. You can further widen the scope of this analysis by blending your finance data with marketing data, help desk data, human resources data, or any other datasets based on your business needs.
Financial diversity
At this stage, the business undergoes a paradigm shift in its financial outlook. Let’s visualize this with the example of a key finance metric—profits. Businesses can discover micro KPIs for profits, that can act as jet engines to propel profitability. This means slicing and dicing profit and analyzing it from multiple dimensions.
This analysis of profit across customers, salespersons, products, invoices, and many more, can add a layer of granularity to profits. Traditionally, you either increase your sales or decrease your expenses to sustain or grow your profits. This multidimensional analysis enables you to rebalance your business efforts by helping you make crucial decisions on things like:
Which customer should the business spend more on to increase profitability?
Is the best performing salesperson by sale value contributing to profitability?
What are the most profitable products/services to align business efforts with?
Future-ready businesses
Here are 3 key strategies that can empower businesses to gear up for the future:
Democratize financial analytics across teams to serve contextual financial insights at every stage of decision-making.
Forecast key finance metrics to make business decisions proactively.
Nurture a collaborative culture within the company to sustain these initiatives.
The advanced, ML-powered AI engine, Ask Zia, empowers finance and non-finance users by allowing them to simply ask questions in English to get instant financial insights. With no knowledge on the datasets, data models, and data relationships, teams can extract powerful insights to gear up for the future. This engine puts actionable insight into the hands of a much larger group of people.
We discuss how you can forecast your key financial metrics, like cash flows, revenues, expenses, and many more, in more detail in our webinar.
Summary
Here’s a quick rundown on some of the key aspects to consider at every stage on the time-growth trajectory, to successfully deploy a BI platform for your financial analytics strategy:
Moment of truth: Work seamlessly with your finance app
Business expansion: Enterprise-grade to scale up to your business needs
Unified business insights: Blend finance and non-finance data for cross-functional insights
Financial diversity: Slice and dice finance data to analyze metrics from multiple dimensions
Future-ready businesses: Built-in AI, advanced analytical and collaborative capabilities
Watch our webinar Financial Analytics: Empowering businesses at every stage of growth to learn more!
Sign up to explore how Zoho Analytics can power your financial analytics strategy today!
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