According to KPMG in their 2017 CEO Outlook survey, “62% of CEOs stated data analytics will be their greatest area of technology investment in 2018.” As the office of finance continues to become a more strategic asset to the business, the data they produce is key to help drive the business forward.

Disruptive technologies are on the rise and they are automating the menial and manual tasks that finance and accounting professionals previously spent the majority of their time on. By investing in these technologies, finance and accounting have more time to analyze what the data is telling them and coming up with the decision path post-analysis to be able to help drive the strategic direction of the business.

Without the visibility into the data and the time to be able to effectively interpret this, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to utilize the data to add value to the organization.

For example, you can move from spending the majority of your time on data management (extracting, transforming and loading this from and too various systems, matching reconciliation data, manually routing and tracking journal entries), to spending time on data analysis (focusing on identifying areas of concern or bottlenecks, putting in place remediating activities to improve the effectiveness of the process, driving actionable intelligence to support key decision making).

For more information on this topic or the other 3 Record to Report trends of 2018, view our webinar recording below.

Written by: Kelli Shoevlin