5 Benefits of Self-Service analytics, and why Unit4 FP&A is the ideal solution
Many organizational and finance leaders would agree that to thrive in today’s competitive and challenging markets, you must let data lead the way – but many organizations lack the tools needed for this kind of data visibility and management.
With a legacy system like Excel for data management, the office of the CFO ends up being the gatekeeper of financial data.
If other key teams want to see financial data, such as HR, operations, or Procurement, they often have to ask for siloed reports, creating manual work for strained financial teams, and bringing unwanted waiting times.
These key functions, like HR, interact with financial data regularly, and in a modern organization, they need unbridled access and clear dissemination of financial data to align operations with corporate goals, and to collaborate beyond their function to form strategy.
In this blog we will cover 5 benefits of self-service analytics, as well as why Unit4 FP&A is considered an ideal solution to achieve easy self-service – read our blog to find out.
What are self-service analytics?
Self-service analytics allows any kind of team to access and understand data easily, without having to request static data or information from the team who controls that data.
Historically, functional data is stored and controlled by its relevant department. This often leads to fragmented and poorly correlated data, with different versions of the truth.
For instance, for HR to successfully navigate payroll negotiations, they may need historic pay rates, what a budget allows, and more. Similarly, procurement teams may need to know financial plans to effectively re-negotiate when a supplier contract terminates.
This isn’t just an issue for the financial department, but often there is a triple play between projects, finance, and HR data that suffers without a single source of integrated data.
Consolidating the data needed is exasperated by other issues caused by fragmented data within legacy systems like Excel, such as a lack of real-time data, poor version history, non-existent audit trails, and much, much more.
When data can be integrated into an integrated enterprise performance management or resource planning Cloud platform, it can flow seamlessly between functions, and the concept of self-service analytics can be achieved easily, meaning data consolidation tasks are reduced greatly, and time is freed for other more pressing issues.
What are the benefits of self-service analytics?
Here are 5 key benefits of self-service analytics across an organization:
Improved Productivity – self-service analytics reduce data consolidation tasks for finance teams while empowering end-users to engage with data themselves. This allows finance teams to focus on more pressing tasks like forming strategy and data analysis, rather than packaging it up for other teams.
Data Democratization - When there is one single source of data, other functions can create their own reports as and when they want them, without creating work for someone else. This promotes a wider understanding of financial performance across the organization.
Enhanced Accuracy – With a single source of integrated data, everyone is working off ‘the same page’ meaning that there are generally fewer data errors across the organization as real-time data can be accessed ad-hoc.
Increased Agility – When uncertainty needs to be planned around, or trends adapted to, teams can get the data they need to do this quickly. Importantly, this means when the unpredictable occurs finance isn’t inundated with data consolidation tasks and can do their own financial work to adapt with the rest of the organization.
Better Collaboration – With an improved and more accurate understanding of financial data, naturally, other teams can collaborate better with finance. Strategies can be formed based on data analysis and the discussions that come from this, rather than a purely functional or supportive relationship.
Why is Unit4 FP&A an ideal solution for self-service analytics?
BARC’s Planning Survey 2024 surveys direct users to understand how different FP&A vendors compare across various KPIs. It’s a great way to compare different vendors based on direct user feedback.
One key KPI that BARC focuses on is ‘self-service’ they report this is “based on the proportion of respondents’ organizations currently using the product in a self-service manner in business departments and how respondents rate the product’s ease of use for planners and developers.”
When surveying users of Unit4 FP&A they found that 75% were from multiple functions and that 67% of planning users were from strategic, operational, and financial planning. This shows that those using Unit4 FP&A are not exclusively finance teams, showing that the self-service capabilities are easy to use and popular across the organization.
Importantly, BARC ranked Unit4 as a leader for self-service analytics in 4 peer groups, rating us 8.6 out of 10 overall, and in the top three vendors in the survey.
Read the BARC Planning Survey 2024 to see how we compared to other vendors overall, visit our dedicated product page to learn more about our self-service capabilities, and talk to sales today to learn how we can make self-service analytics a reality for your organization.
