The Ledger

Why You Need More Than a Spreadsheet For Your Finances

Over 1 billion people use Excel for their finance activities. For decades, spreadsheet software has offered a fairly simple, very flexible approach for gathering and analyzing data. That doesn’t work so well these days with the enormous amounts of data that companies have access to. Excel lacks the flexibility and environment to manage all of this data and to give the visibility needed to make strategic decisions. Excel can be an excellent tool for simple productivity, but it becomes an issue when it becomes a financial tool. This is why it is important to find an enterprise cost and profitability system that has the capabilities to enhance your business, instead hindering its success.

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Achieving Sustainable and Profitable Growth with the Right Focus

Today’s organizations are laser-focused on sustainable, profitable growth.  Unfortunately, it is much easier said than done. To accomplish this growth, companies need to focus on planning, budgeting and forecasting costs.  That puts CFOs in the hot seat, as finance and accounting are now expected to deliver strong competencies in financial planning and analysis, while facing intense pressure to work ever faster and more efficiently. To work smarter and deliver better-quality information to support organizational strategies, you need to find the time to benchmark. In finance, the key performance indicators to examine fall under three main categories: costs, staff productivity, and process efficiency.

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Better Decisions with Data Visualization

“The best data visualization tools expose something new about the underlying patterns and relationships contained within the data. Understanding those relationships, and being able to observe them, is key to making better decisions. With data visualization, FP&A practitioners have accessible tools for data discovery, which is converted into information, and further transformed into knowledge (insights and foresights).”

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Time is Money

The saying “time is money” rings so true for businesses these days. Time is a critical business resource that needs to be measured and managed. It is the primary useful metric for managing in real-time spaces because it’s the most meaningful referential metric, and people understand it. Applications of balanced scorecards, activity-based costing/management, lean manufacturing, value chain analysis, and supply chain management have become established practices within the business community.

Earning money has typically been associated with and restricted to traditional ‘offline’ route. With the Internet taking over a large part of our lives, more people are looking to ways to earn money online to increase their financial inflows, with secondary income streams such as responsible gambling at trusted websites like betmove.

The philosophy of continuous improvement known as Kaizen permeates most of the recent improvements realized in these practices. So, what’s next?

Read More at Strategic Finance Magazine >