GTA Accountants & Finance Network

With evolving trends in both technology and corporate management, Finance is increasingly being looked to as a key source of strategic information. While most Finance teams do a good job of producing financial statements and related analysis, there are increasing possibilities to leverage systems to produce actionable Key Performance Indicators (“KPIs”), often in real time, that can guide corporate strategic decision making. Depending on the industry, KPIs may include: the number of units sold by product type; customer concentration; firm capacity utilization/availability; margin by product; profitability by client; and, almost anything else that your firm’s systems can track.

While Excel dashboards can capture some of the nuance in your company’s data, they are limited to working with the size of datasets (>1M records) that most midmarket companies generate as a matter of course. Thus, the future of KPIs lies with dashboarding and data visualization products such as Power BI, Tableau, Looker, and others. Not only can these products work seamlessly with large data sets and integrate many different systems, but dashboards can easily be set up for different groups in your organization – so the CEO can have one dashboard, the CFO another, the regional VPs another and the COO yet another.