This article focuses on the best of both worlds: a highly professional reporting solution and an advanced visualization tool.

Aucun texte alternatif pour cette image

Neither data visualization with dashboards nor financial reporting software is new. In fact, both technologies date back to the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, managers and department heads must have suffered from poor design experiences, lack of automated data flow, and so on. Then, as these features improved, another problem arose; the companies building financial reporting tools were almost never the same companies building dashboard tools. Of course, there have been acquisitions on both sides, but neither has ever stayed or become a market leader in both areas. After 30 years, there is still no combined user experience where the Finance Office can use “the best of both worlds” to provide its management teams with highly professional reports and analysis. Currently, the preferred experience is in the Cloud .

Examples of the two technology camps

Examples of these two “technology camps” are the visualization tools on one side, with solutions like Power BI (Microsoft) , Tableau (Salesforce) and Qlik (Thoma Bravo), and the tools corporate performance management on the other, such as Adaptive Insights (Workday), Solver (Solver) and Prophix (Prophix).

How can CFOs around the world provide both highly professional reports and cutting-edge visualization to their internal customers? First, they can avoid investing in poor hybrids that overly eager salespeople and consultants often promote. In other words, dashboards that try to be financial reporting tools and financial reporting tools that try to be dashboards. The lack of functionality and flexibility in such hybrids generally leads other departments (outside of the finance office) to buy their own cutting-edge solutions anyway. This often leads to unnecessary investment, excessive training and poor integration. These solutions frequently result in “many versions of the truth.” This means that there are different formulas and data repositories providing the same information, such as revenue or gross margin, but without reconciling these different solutions.

The best of both worlds

Recently, with all of the aforementioned providers providing their solutions as Cloud offerings with constantly improving integrations, the Finance Office now has a new opportunity to provide “the best of both worlds” in visualization and in financial reporting. At Solver , for example, we decided to offer a deep integration with Power BI from Microsoft , so that our customers Solver can automate and streamline both the financial reporting experience, the visualization and the analysis they provide to their managers.

This type of solution allows fans of dashboards to transfer their analyzes to financial reports with a single click on a link, while managers who previously relied mainly on formatted reports can now benefit from powerful visualization. and interactive. Direct integration guarantees “one version of the truth” when managers navigate back and forth.

So, while suppliers and consulting firms offer cutting-edge, integrated financial reporting dashboards and solutions, what can the CFO do to make faster and better decisions across the organization? We will talk about it in a future blog.

Solver lets make decisions with sa suite CPM Web de premier plan consisting of budgeting, reports, dashboards and data warehousing, delivered via a web portal.Solver is reinventing CPM (Corporate Performance Management) with its new generation solution. Solver provides professional users with modern features, including innovative use of Excel in the report design process. If you want to know more,our team will be delighted to know your organizational needs and objectives .

4 OCTOBRE 2019/PAR NILS RASMUSSEN (CEO Solver)