Accounts Payable Software

Article credit: Sage 

In last year’s CFO 3.0 survey sponsored by Sage, nearly half of CFOs said increased demand to provide overall business counsel was a factor in transforming their role over the last five years. Even before the pandemic when this survey was taken, the pressures on finance were increasing to make data-driven decisions based on real-time data. You can see the survey results online: CFO 3.0: Digital transformation beyond financial management.

If you’re like many finance teams, you have access to reporting, analytics, and dashboards to track your most important KPIs. You also have a good idea of what happened and how the data is trending for the metrics you care about. You can even drill down to get more detail. But, to truly make agile decisions in collaboration with other stakeholders, you need to anticipate all the questions and variables that will impact your decision and prebuild that analysis. Forecasting may involve exporting to spreadsheets and manually extrapolating the data. And finally, you need to package your results to share and present it.

Sometimes this process happens in minutes, but sometimes it takes hours or days. Changing reports and manipulating the data takes time away from more productive activities like analysis, formulating recommended actions, and securing alignment around the recommended actions. The delays also could mean you’re making decisions on data that’s already out of date, potentially missing opportunities or slowing your reaction to threats.

Transform your decision-making with Sage Intacct Interactive Visual Explorer

Sage Intacct Interactive Visual Explorer takes an innovative approach to solving these problems and transforming your decision-making. Here’s how:

1. Accelerate insights and decrease preparation time: Synthesize the information and find the answers you need by exploring your data in real-time from multiple angles. As you discover new insights and generate new questions, it’s just a few clicks to answer the next question. No spreadsheet gymnastics are required. You can easily share your story with stakeholders by embedding your visuals in Sage Intacct Dashboards or by exporting to slides, spreadsheets, PDF, or files. So you can use the time you save to recommend actions and gain alignment.
2. Interpret data quickly and enhance understanding: Visual discovery allows you and your stakeholders to digest and understand the data more quickly. With over 25 visuals, you can choose the best visuals to tell your story and enhance your stakeholders’ understanding. Trends, patterns, and outliers are understood in seconds.
   
3. Look into the future: With built-in predictive functions based on machine learning, you can forecast your data into the future with just a click.

4. Collaboratively find answers: Your audience understands the data with narration embedded in the visuals. The ease of looking at your data from various angles allows you to proactively anticipate any questions that may come up. And, if you didn’t anticipate every question, you can easily collaborate in meetings and find answers on the fly by simply changing filters and dimensions.

5. Turn insights into action: With Interactive Visual Explorer, easily select the right visual, sequence visuals, and add narration. You can tell your story clearly and recommend actions, enabling you to focus on acting vs. understanding.

With Interactive Visual Explorer you get answers to a wide variety of financial questions ranging across customer, revenue and expense, receivables, vendors, purchasing, payments, budgets, operational productivity, and more.

“We use Sage Intacct Interactive Visual Explorer to manage project resources and utilization as well as to compare budgets. It’s very intuitive. We love that we can quickly navigate between projects and customize graphs on the fly. It replaces Excel for us—it’s more accurate, easier to analyze the information, and more collaborative. We can make more strategic business decisions because we’re able to focus on the strategy vs. gathering the data.”

Leanne Malsbury, Associate Director of Finance, Halloran

Analytic insights for small-to-medium businesses

While many standalone business intelligence solutions are expensive to implement and require in-depth training, Interactive Visual Explorer is tailored to small-to-medium businesses. It’s powerful, yet quick, easy, and inexpensive for your financial analysis. Because the data structures are already prebuilt and ready to use, it’s easier to get up and running than most business intelligence tools. Additionally, with over 200 prebuilt visualizations, an existing visualization is quick to modify and get the exact insights you need.

If you’re in the market for a new solution and would like to learn how Sage Intacct might be able to help you, contact us today.

Article credit: Sage 

With the evolution of technology comes the evolution of the chief financial officer.

When it comes to the world of finance, the term “digital transformation” has become a part of the everyday conversation surrounding success in the industry.

More than two thirds of CFOs (70%) said they had full responsibility for digital transformation in their organisation – CFO 3.0: Digital transformation beyond financial management

As companies clamour to boost efficiency while cutting costs, the role of CFO is increasingly data-driven and focused on analytics, moving beyond financial management to be a technology futurist.

This is Financial Leadership 3.0.

Read on to find out how you can save time and use valuable data to add even more value to your business in 2021 and beyond.

Here’s what we cover:

1. Embrace automation

2. Revel in real-time reporting

3. Tap into improved analytics

4. Dig into role-based dashboards

1. Embrace automation

Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation present opportunities when budgets are tight.

Repetitive tasks – from chasing invoices to handling payroll and expenses management – can be automated, freeing up your finance team to work on strategy rather than tedious admin and data entry.

A significant amount of time and resources can be saved through automation, which eliminates manual data entry and spreadsheets to close the books faster.

Key tasks your finance team can automate

1. Job costings
2. Data collection
3. Invoicing
4. Payment collection
5. Credit control
6. Reconciliation

2. Revel in real-time reporting

Did you know 51% of CFOs say thinking of new ways to help their business financially is the most challenging aspect of their job?

Few industries move faster than finance.

Decisions need to be made and ideas need to be generated to keep costs down and efficiency up.

Real-time reporting makes it possible for CFOs to respond to ever-changing conditions proactively and with more precision than ever before. It also impacts your accounting teams and wider management, who need a high-level view of financial health to make better decisions, faster.

Benefits of real-time reporting

• Granular view of how the organisation is doing
• Quicker detection of fraud and human error
• Increased accuracy of predictions and forecasts
• Better-informed business decisions

3. Tap into improved analytics

While trusting your instincts remains a vital part of any finance role, data has completely transformed the way we make business-critical decisions.

Through AI and automation, you help your organisation strengthen connections with customers, build better relationships with their teams, and plot a course for a successful future for their business.

Data and analytics are the key accelerant of an organization’s digitisation and transformation efforts.” – Gartner

Predictive analytics can help you understand data more effectively.

Predictive analytics use machine learning together with data mining techniques and modelling to make more accurate predictions based on historical information.

By tapping into cloud technology, you can collect and collate this data from different areas of the business into one clear view.

4. Dig into role-based dashboards

A successful business isn’t built on rapid growth, but sustainable growth.

To do that, you need decisions backed by data. That’s where business intelligence comes in, empowering CFOs to identify fresh opportunities for growth and innovation.

When it comes to business intelligence, you need quick access to dashboards and reports tailored to your role.

These can be auto-generated using cloud technology, providing role-specific visibility on figures as and when they’re needed across the company.