Finance leaders don't spend their time on spreadsheets

A study by PWC (Finance Effectiveness Benchmark Study 2021) confirms that finance leaders today play a more prominent role than ever in making strategic decisions – both financial and operational. Indeed, top finance leaders today spend up to 73% of their time analyzing data and the resulting “actionable insights”.

That’s a big difference compared to few years ago. At that time, the study showed that financial profiles were 47% engaged in analysis, and another 53% in collecting data. A clear shift for finance towards business thinking, which provides more added value for the company.

4 reasons why finance leaders spend 73% of their time analyzing data

1. Spreadsheets are not very intuitive to use.

An average user can build basic formulas, create charts and also pivot. But for other functions, the majority quickly turns to the “advanced spreadsheet hero” of the company who does the magic. Not only not very user-friendly, but also not very insightful.

A reporting platform such as BrightAnalytics is intuitive to use for everyone, financially trained or not. Management reports are built up from your business strategy: clear and comprehensible for everyone.

2. Spreadsheets and human error go hand in hand.

One small typo, formula error, or wrong selection of data range can quickly produce a waterfall of incorrect results. Who wants to make strategic decisions based on numbers that are difficult to verify? Either you don’t even notice the error, or you spend hours troubleshooting to find the needle in the haystack.

In a reporting tool, all data that is automatically retrieved from accounting, ERP or CRM systems, for example, is systematically subjected to health checks. Top notch reliability.

3. Crashproof spreadsheets have not been invented yet.

The more you grow, the greater the volume of data becomes and the more complex the formulas. As a result, the spreadsheets respond more and more slowly. To avoid crashes, historical figures are often deleted, but this also causes historical benchmarks to be lost.

Flexible the spreadsheet is, but agile for growth is not a feature of it. The more ambitious your growth plans and the more diverse your organizational structure becomes, the more you will benefit from a management reporting platform. BrightAnalytics displays both historical data and the results of many a complex structure in an organized and clear way, covering the entire organization or filtered by entities, business units, provinces and more.

4. Spreadsheets are soon dinosaurs.

Finally, we touch on data collection. Keeping reports up-to-date in spreadsheets is often a time-consuming, manual process, and you depend on various departments to get recent figures. By the time you have obtained all the data, the numbers are history. So you keep updating your reports last-minute from FinalReport and FinalReport_v1 to Final Report_v10-update and even FinalReport-v11-finalB.

BrightAnalytics offers a solution

BrightAnalytics gives everyone who needs it one correct, up-to-date version of the truth in one click. The same reliable figures for everyone that:

• Actionable insights, on which you can make your management decisions. Just like Codit: they use BrightAnalytics as a steering mechanism in management meetings.
• Leading to savings in the short term. Cigar manufacturer J. Cortes, for example, spotted a gigantic water leak almost immediately, due to a striking increase in costs.
• Even boost your sales. At Serax, sales representatives on the road analyze the entire history of a retailer in just ten minutes. So all the valuable information is always at hand!