Making Your Data Work for You in Financial Services

Published on 17 Apr 2023

business data analysis

Most businesses use expansion as a proxy for success. However, the dynamics of corporate expansion might delay progress if you don't have a solution that grows with you. To make better judgments and adapt quickly to new circumstances, businesses providing financial services require unrestricted access to all relevant financial, operational, and human resources data. But this becomes impossible if your staff is always burdened with gathering data for reports.

What if you had a program that helped you consolidate and cancel accounts or make hiring plans more efficiently? What if information from several sources was readily available and up-to-date? Imagine if you could get rid of extra steps and stop reconciling things that don't need to be. What if you could forecast budgets and headcount, carry out all HR, payroll, and financial operations, and assess your progress in real-time? Having everything in one place makes it easier to answer hypothetical questions.

Conflicting Data

Disjointed data and technological complexity might work against you if you don't have a unified operational paradigm. The majority of CFOs (53%) expressed worry that data and information exchange methods were not simplified and that the finance department was reactive in the Accenture study "Automation and Other Challenges Facing CFOs." Furthermore, 46% hypothesized they would feel this way during the next two years. 

It was also mentioned that gathering essential data presented difficulties. Fewer than half of the CFOs polled said their department benefited from enhanced connectedness to other parts of the business via sophisticated data analysis.

Operating efficiently or answering strategic concerns is easier if your data is cohesive and coherent. Overburdened workers may feel even more pressure due to delays, insecure data transmissions, and redundant information that needs to be linked.

Interdependencies In Data And Their Significance

How can you put your data to use in strategic planning, operational execution, and analytical reflection throughout your whole enterprise? You need a unified answer that can scale to your needs, provide a wide range of customization options, and set up your processes to complement rather than compete. Workday's solution eliminates the need for manual data entry and reconciliation and improves the accuracy of future planning.

Data interdependencies allow you to do more than just answer basic queries like "How much money have I made so far this quarter?" shift from asking tactical questions like "How much money have I booked so far?" to more strategic inquiries like "Which employees are most responsible for this revenue?" and "When can we compensate them fairly?"

Finance, human resources, and payroll data dependencies.

Generally speaking, there are three types of management software: financial, human capital, and payroll. Financial software tracks transactions like debits and credits, revenues and expenditures, and assets and liabilities. Human capital software tracks demographic and benefits information for employees.

But these systems also have similar data structures, such as cost center hierarchies and management frameworks. Data inconsistencies occur because these structures are often copied into different systems. What happens, for instance, if a cost center is modified in one system but not the other? Furthermore, data might have varying interpretations depending on the context. Consider the word "location" as an illustration. In human resources, this might refer to a building where classes are held; in finance, to a specific shelf or bin; in payroll, to an employee's residency or employment. It's the same word used in various ways across an organization, leading to confusion and preventing useful inferences from being drawn.

A unified system makes it more likely that different divisions will collaborate on data and data structures and consider them their own. Data interdependencies are being uncovered and comprehended using input from specialists from all throughout the firm. Topics include how human resources might use information stored in finance and payroll to understand employee output better. and "How can budgeting be influenced by information typically housed in human resources?"

Download Workday's whitepaper to learn more about Making Your Data Work for You in Financial Services only on Whitepapers Online.

 

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