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Business intelligence helps to translate complex models into a clear story

If you work in finance, working with sheets of data is part of your everyday life. You think in formulas. You communicate in tables and variances. You eat columns of data for breakfast. Numbers just make sense.

Outside of finance, it’s a different story. All those rows, columns and sheets can make it difficult and overwhelming to understand what the data is trying to say. As a result, all your hard work is at risk of getting downplayed, misinterpreted, or ignored by your business partners unless it can be visualised neatly for them.

The importance of financial analytics in business intelligence

Business intelligence lets you translate spreadsheets into actionable insights through data visualisation. Financial performance software makes it easy to create informative charts and graphs so everyone can instantly understand what the numbers are saying without too much context or even the numbers themselves.

Turning numbers into visuals for actionable insights

The benefits of using business intelligence software to visualise data include:

  • Giving non-finance partners the ability to understand KPIs and financial data analytics
  • Making it simple to compare period-over-period results
  • Spending more time discussing performance and results instead figuring out what to focus on
  • The ability to drill down into visuals and charts to view the underlying data source

Dashboards can help you see the story in your data

To create graphs and charts using a static planning process often involves a lot of copying and pasting. Every time the underlying data changes you need to go through and ensure your graphs are updated to reflect the new data—time you often need to just get the data in the first place. Even if your graphs are automatically refreshed from spreadsheet data, they’re not intelligent; they can’t answer the “why” behind the numbers.

On the other hand, an active planning process uses business intelligence software that’s truly intelligent. Any charts and graphs you create are connected directly to the source data, keeping them up to date without any extra effort. And if your partners do want to dig into the "why," it just takes a click to drill through and see the underlying data down to the transaction level.

Deliver personalised charts to different business stakeholders

Incorporate analytics into your financial planning

Workday Adaptive Planning puts all your financial data and business intelligence tools in one place, making it simple to create, edit, and update charts with no technical or design skills required.

Workday Adaptive Planning dashboard screenshot
Create visuals for every scenario

Our BI analytics software lets you create interactive visualisations in a variety of formats ranging from standard bar, column, and doughnut charts to more innovative waterfall, bubble, and funnel graphics. Any user can then perform a variety of business performance analytics, such as drill-down analytics, variance reporting, and what-if scenario planning.

Make your business more intelligent

Thanks to the power of our business intelligence software, Workday Adaptive Planning makes it easy to get the insights you need to make smarter, faster business decisions. Watch a demo of our business analytics software in action.

Data visualisation can help you make better business decisions.

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Ebook

Your Top Four Reporting Challenges (and how to overcome them, once and for all)

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This eBook looks at four common financial reporting challenges and what you can do to solve them. You’ll learn how to eliminate tasks that add little value, such as data gathering, verification, and formatting—freeing your finance team to become ...