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Creating compelling visuals seems like a bonus, not a necessity, when working with business managers or presenting to executives. Delivering accurate data takes priority over the way you present the data.
The problem is, without a clear visual it's more difficult to tell a story through the numbers. When your time is consumed checking the numbers and making last minute changes, you're caught in the weeds unable to see the big picture. You're asked for the 'why' behind the numbers, but you worked overtime just to get the data right. On top of that, creating dashboards in spreadsheets would take days or weeks of time you don't have.
Common Challenges with Dashboards
There's Not Enough Time
Reports and dashboards don't build themselves. Especially if you're relying on spreadsheets to build out visual aids for data. Getting to the right numbers takes priority over the look.
Problems you deal with:
- Cobbling spreadsheets together to get the latest version takes days or longer
- Making sure you're working with the latest version can take detective work
- Understanding changes and edits other business owners made can be tricky
- Double-checking the model to make sure there are no errors or inconsistencies before your present
It's Not Easy to Build Quality Reports
When you're already crunched for time, deciding which KPIs and data points tell the best story can be difficult. You also have to build different versions for your different groups of stakeholders. When it comes down to it, you don't have the time or brainpower given the rest of the work you're doing.
You need to consider:
- Which data points are the best to tell a story?
- When it takes so long to get to the right data, how should you present it visually?
- Last minute updates always mean you're running around to deliver the final version on time
- How will you answer the 'why' behind the numbers, which is a whole new exercise
- Even if you have a dashboard, splicing and dicing the data adds hours of work
The Data Has to Be Correct, and Up to Date
At the end of the day, presenting inaccurate or outdated numbers could cost you your job. So, you focus more time on gathering and checking that you have the latest numbers instead of how the data will be presented. But without a clean visual, you end up getting more questions and more work.
Challenges you face include:
- Data accuracy is the top priority, the rest is secondary
- Last minute requests and edits add to the complexity of delivering the right numbers
- You may have the right data, but it might not be the latest data
- You're working on a hard deadline, with ad hoc requests coming in last minute
- The risk of presenting something inaccurate is too great
Imagine a Planning Process That Makes it Easy to Create Compelling Visuals
You spend so much time manually consolidating and validating data that you have no time to build quality, relevant reports. And even if you have the time, spreadsheets don't make it easy to create visually appealing dashboards. When you spend more time on visuals, you can spend your time on strategic analysis and getting buy-in from stakeholders.
You need an active planning process that meets three criteria—It has to be collaborative, comprehensive, and continuous. With these three factors, you have participation from key stakeholders, the tools and information necessary to build complex dashboards quickly, and you have up to date models that can be refreshed in minutes. Benefits of active planning include:
Collaborative
- Engage finance and business owners across the organization with ease of use
- Empower adoption with self-service capabilities
- Spend more time analyzing your model instead of creating it
- Always work with real-time data
- Drag-and-drop report building features
- Have confidence that everyone is working in the same model version
Comprehensive
- Create dashboards that integrate your actuals and plan
- Easily manage models & forecasts across all integrated data sources
- Run flexible what-if analyses
- Access audit trails to see what changed, when, and who did it
- Easily account for multiple currencies, exchange rates, etc.
- Get business insights from real-time data
- Build board reports for senior management
Continuous
- Automate data consolidation from all sources
- Export operational data from GL, payroll, purchasing, etc.
- Collaborate with business partners
- Course-correct with more agility
- Run scenario plans in minutes
- Update reports with one click
- Use flexible modeling that lets you build on the fly and adjust dimensions as needed
When you have these three components, we call it "active planning"
We can now focus on presenting management with most strategic data as KPI dashboards, and more long term outlook scenarios. We are providing more added value to management than we ever could have before... It’s a really big advantage. It’s really a good feeling to see what took you a few working days before, now takes you five minutes. It’s a huge deal for us.
Adi Zaidel, Corporate FP&A Manager
