The days of PowerPoint charts are over, thanks to the development of financial data visualization. It has also elevated the FP&A organization to a new degree of excellence within firms. “A picture is worth a thousand words,” another way of stating “seeing is believing,” is undoubtedly something you’ve heard before.
What if the image was made up of raw data to useful, actionable information? Yes, you are correct. We’re discussing data visualization. It’s creating visual representations of data, such as charts and graphs, that effectively express ideas.
These graphs and charts assist leaders and decision-makers in the making better, data-driven data visualization choices faster. It also prevents them from becoming entangled in statistics and data points. The days of hours combing through data presented conventionally are long gone.
Need for Financial Data Visualization
Finance must impact establishing a new, data-driven culture, and data visualization is an important part of that. Facilitating management decision-making by assisting finance professionals in telling their organization’s financial statement so that everyone understands.
As a result, higher KPIs and a stronger competitive position will result. It’s simpler to draw your stakeholders’ attention to the correct facts to focus on and the right questions to ask when you bring the story of your financial data to life.
Informed decision-making has reached new heights, so digital champions include the finance department in their digital transformation efforts.
Advantages of data visualization in finance
Organizations may harness their data to better all elements of their company by employing data visualization techniques. These new data visualization approaches also have significant advantages over traditional reporting methods.
These benefits of data visualization provide firms with a distinct competitive advantage. And the potential for growth and efficiency that may be mined soon pays for the initial expenditures of introducing visualization tools.
1. Allows you to comprehend your financial data more efficiently:
Because most individuals are visual learners, representations of concepts and new information are naturally preferred by most of the globe. Hence, users can see the context of the facts you’re attempting to express via charts and graphs.
Traditional reporting approaches often give static data points, leaving the analyst and the reader to interpret them. When it comes to data-driven decision-making, interpretation is always a risk.
2. Allows for rapid results interpretation:
A sales manager may easily see how each of their territories performs concerning targets by glancing at the graphic below. You can also analyze the sales based on gender and sales per month.
In a standard report containing static data points, the manager can take longer to reach this conclusion – if they get there at all. Instead of figuring out the problem, the time saved may now be used to develop solutions, saving both time and money.
3. Large-scale, efficient data interpretation:
In addition to the increased interpretation speed, a manager may now handle larger amounts of data. It can help him view the larger picture more clearly and report more concisely. Visualization tools use filtering attributes for diving deeper into data.
4. Aids in the discovery of patterns and anomalies:
Trending data is simpler to notice than in monthly reports with static data points in a chart or graph. They may even identify what goods are contributing to the miss over time if they dig further.
The ability to go further into the visual patterns helps the management make better decisions and discover what is consistently contributing to the problem.
5. Improves the user’s engagement:
Financial data sets may be tedious and challenging to comprehend, especially when large and complicated. Finance departments may boost audience engagement by presenting facts visually appealingly.
Financial data visualization is more engaging, but it also aids viewers in comprehending what they’re viewing more rapidly. As a result, their comprehensive power will increase, and they will be able to gain faster insights.
6. Better data access & emphasized insights:
Visualization tools may assist all users – not just techies – gain access to the necessary data in an easily understandable format. If data is not visible, important information might get buried in statistics.
Visualization aids in emphasizing crucial points so that viewers may remember them and act on them. Finance departments may also use images to help express the significance of key information.
Important Data Visualization Tools
PowerBI
Dashboards are the distribution method for PowerBI’s visual analytics platform. Aids in the creation of customized dashboards for finance and other specific departments and the building of specialized executive dashboards to aid in decision-making.
These dashboards use role-based access restrictions to adhere to data security and compliance regulations (RBAC). It provides authorized personnel with data access while avoiding overprovisioning. A consultant may also create visuals that can be stored and reused indefinitely, allowing your workers to develop insights quickly and easily.
Tableau
Tableau runs on data, and a data analytics consulting services provider may work with your company and Tableau to build pipelines that extract and load data into the platform. Tableau’s platform-agnostic feature allows data to originate from any cloud platform or database dialect.
A consultant can recommend representations from the Tableau public gallery or create bespoke visualizations based on your unique business requirements. These visualizations are then incorporated into your finance dashboards, where data is customized depending on seniority for detailed compliance and security controls.
Qlik
Qlik helps drive the analytics revolution by providing real-time data analytics and meaningful business insight. Data visualization, executive dashboards, and self-service BI tools are their specialties.
They also provide a full suite of analytics services, including “self-service analytics, interactive dashboards and apps, conversational analytics, bespoke and embedded analytics, and mobile analytics.” Furthermore, their goods make use of AI and automation.
Thinklytics
The Thinklytics data analytics platform combines current BI and real-time analytics capability in a single platform. This platform allows you to extract and load data from various source databases, making data discovery within Looker much easier.
It combines data from a variety of sources without jeopardizing performance or security. The data visualization feature of Looker may then be used to create graphs and charts.
Conclusion
To make educated judgments, finance departments require on-demand access to data. A robust business intelligence (BI) architecture with flexible visualization capabilities must aggregate and show data in user-friendly forms.
To avoid mistakes, utilize opportunities, and forecast what will happen in the future, your finance experts must detect and visualize key performance indicators (KPIs) and trends. Interactive dashboards, self-service BI, and analytics have become the new must-have business tools for data-driven enterprises.
Our data analytics consulting services provider, Thinklytics, can assist you in developing the best strategy and plan for your company’s specific needs. We help you create a data-driven culture and utilize predictive analytics to make better decisions.