With their deep-rooted understanding of a business’s strategic objectives, chief financial officers (CFOs) are in the best position to lead digital transformation initiatives. This includes the use of finance analytics in making decisions to drive business performance. 

More data and more information do not always set your business up for success. What you need are actionable insights. These are meaningful findings that trigger action among key stakeholders. To safeguard its context from overuse, let’s take a deep dive into what actionable insights are — its attributes, how to distinguish actionable from non-actionable insights, what makes insights actionable and other key information about this topic.

As humans, we like visuals because they make information easier to understand. However, not all data visualizations are the same — some are effective in simplifying complex data while some confuse the audience. So how can you ensure that you’re sending clear and digestible information to your target audience? These data visualization best practices can help.

A business intelligence (BI) roadmap guides your business to where it needs to go in terms of implementing BI strategies. It establishes your target goal and identifies the steps and milestones needed to reach that goal.

Root cause analysis is an effective way to resolve a problem and prevent it from happening again. It digs down the root cause by determining how and why it occurred in the first place. By identifying a problem’s core, business leaders can think of actual solutions instead of relying on quick fixes.

The adoption rate for business intelligence in accounting is increasing over time. As it grows, accounting firms should devote more attention to enhancing their BI capabilities to attract more digitally-focused clients — and of course, to offer more value to the existing ones.