If you are interested in learning more about financial performance insights in Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance, contact us here to find out how we can help you grow your business. You can also email us at info@loganconsulting.com or call (312) 345-8817.
How Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance can Deliver Finance Leaders Business Performance Insights
Posted on: July 10, 2023 | By: Guy Logan | Microsoft Dynamics AX/365, Microsoft Dynamics Manufacturing
As businesses face the current economic uncertainty, CFOs and finance teams find themselves in the spotlight, expected to protect short-term financial health and drive long-term growth. However, many struggle to obtain the insights necessary to pivot quickly and make informed decisions. In this blog, we delve into the power of automation, AI, and analytics in transforming finance operations and empowering leaders to navigate disruption successfully. Continue reading to learn how finance leaders can leverage Dynamics 365 Finance to ensure that their business is hyperconnected and performs well this intuitive data model.
Finance leaders can create a hyper-connected enterprise
Although CFOs may not be directly responsible for data security and connectivity, a strong partnership between finance and IT is crucial for successfully implementing business performance analytics.
With unified and accessible data, finance leaders can empower their teams to quickly gain insights and position themselves as leaders in innovation and business transformation. To realize these benefits, it is essential to consolidate all business data for a comprehensive view of the organization and embed intelligence in every function to promote proactive decision-making and collaboration among employees. To achieve this, finance leaders should collaborate with IT to:
- Unify data: Many well-defined business processes, like procure to pay, quote-to-cash, and other regular ledger and subledger processes, consist of a collection of documents related to the other. Unifying data from the ledger, subledger, and source documents makes using data from these different sources simpler.
- Simplify reporting: Streamlined reporting enables the finance team and other teams to create the reports they need, which previously would have taken weeks or months with IT experts or outside vendors.
- Adopt self-service analytics: Operationalizing custom reports and ad hoc analytics for the business through self-service analytics enables comprehensive digital transformation, even for organizations with limited IT investment. This empowers finance teams to use their data.
Actionable insights with self-service analytics
Self-service analytics refers to the ability of a business user to access unified, actionable data and intelligent technology to make informed decisions quickly. This technology is designed to be used by any user, no matter their sophistication, and can significantly contribute to driving growth and creating value beyond financial metrics. In the past, these benefits were challenging for organizations to achieve due to the complexity of technology implementation.
With self-service analytics, organizations can take advantage of technology that eliminates the need for finance professionals to have expertise in data science and IT, or access to external resources.
Now, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance users can validate data quality, generate customized reports, and easily extract valuable insights. With self-service analytics, finance teams can independently access, analyze, and use their data to make informed decisions.
Business performance analytics
Microsoft’s latest innovation, business performance analytics, delivers insights directly to all users, regardless of technical ability. Business performance analytics empowers finance professionals to make informed decisions without needing advanced skills or data science understanding. This solution simplifies the process of gaining insights from data by providing a comprehensive and user-friendly view across multiple business processes.
With business performance analytics, all users can easily access and analyze data, helping to streamline regular financial reporting and shorten cycle times, allowing finance teams to focus on strategic initiatives. It enables reporting in a more holistic, less siloed way, across multiple systems of record, by normalizing data. Built on Microsoft Dataverse, it includes a web-based reporting hub where customers can create reporting via Excel, Power BI, and other templates.
Finally, with business performance analytics, we enhance the growth potential of Dynamics 365 Finance capabilities by leveraging unified data for AI and machine learning. With AI-powered solutions, we will enable teams to identify opportunities to improve financial performance automatically. Through Microsoft’s partnership with Open AI and recent acquisitions in business domains like process mining and AI-driven spend analytics, Microsoft will help auto-detect and recommend ways to protect organizations from risk and guard against future disruption.
Learn what’s next at Finance Reimagined
Integrating financial data across an entire organization and giving the finance team a wealth of self-serve analytics tools will deliver significant benefits across a business. Business performance analytics will be available in public preview with 2023 release wave 1. Microsoft’s focus will be on ensuring the business performance analytics capabilities within Dynamics 365 Finance helps customers to:
- Simplify data insights by providing a comprehensive and user-friendly view across multiple sources in near real time.
- Allow all users of all technical abilities to quickly access and analyze data to facilitate faster decisions and better business performance.
- Enable ease-of-use through familiar apps like Excel and Power BI.
- Streamline financial reporting and operations to reduce cycle times and focus on strategic initiatives.
- Provide auditors with direct access to financial data, enabling them to quickly access and analyze the information they need, making the audit process more efficient.