Finance professionals regard business analytics, otherwise known as financial analytics, as a phase in the auditing process. However, as business intelligence (BI) tools get innovative, its benefits also expand further.
Data can now be put into perspective and utilized by all members of an organization, at whatever phase they may need it during operations. This opens up a myriad of possibilities and advantages for the organization.
What are the benefits of business intelligence tools?
Reduced labor costs, higher productivity
Seeking the help of IT professionals to create data visualizations takes a lot of time, effort, and is quite crippling in terms of relying on somebody else to do it. The best BI tools empower anyone to easily create a harmony of pooled data, usually through a drag and drop interface. Executives and staff do not need to seek the help of IT specialists for interactive data presentations and wait for its lengthy completion, allowing everyone to make better use of their time on more important tasks.
Related: Learning the Components of Business Intelligence
Organizes Data from Various Data Sources
A BI system automates the process of having to extract data from various sources—spreadsheets, databases, big data sources such as Salesforce, Google Analytics, and Amazon Redshift, among others.
BI software eliminates manual inputting, seamlessly integrating selected data from almost every data source available, to produce a comprehensive visualization of facts.
Gives valuable insights about business
Data visualization tools rendered by BI software immediately clue you in on sales performance and customer analysis. Sales by category, region or segment can be easily viewed to determine which offerings are most profitable and which one can lead to losses.
It also gives you a clear understanding of your exact buyer persona, enabling you to tailor-fit all your efforts in creating a more personal experience with your target market, cementing relationships and loyalty. BI reporting tools can even do this in real-time, giving you a highly competitive advantage to take action instantaneously whenever an opportunity or an issue arises.
Make data actionable
Massive data means nothing for a business until organized and presented in such a way that is easily understandable. BI software helps businesses recognize patterns that have never been discovered before, as well as establish relationships between different data sets, that might otherwise be obscure if not for intelligible data visualizations.
Faster, Better Decisions
The results produced by BI tools serve as a catalyst for making the best business decisions in the quickest time possible. They say that haste makes waste, but BI tools are remarkably an exception to the rule. It automates and accelerates data integration, visualization, and analytics without any risks involved for the user, only a myriad of benefits that lead to the best business outcomes.
If you want to scrutinize the past and current performance of your business and make the best use of your data that has just been sitting around, then now is the perfect time to consider utilizing business intelligence tools for straightforward business analytics.
Eager to gain competitive advantage through your data? Give business intelligence a try. Learn more by downloading our Business Analytics Whitepaper or getting in touch today with the finance professionals at D&V!
This post was first published 5 April 2016 and edited 26 March 2021.
Edited by: Maria Katrina dela Cruz
