Addressing FP&A Challenges with High-Speed Analytics on the Cloud

What can turn an organization from a data behemoth into a well-oiled profit machine? A lot of experts will say it is on-time, precise financial planning and analysis (FP&A). However, despite being crucial to an organization’s revenues, the FP&A function struggles to deliver accurate forecasts and high-speed insights, especially when enterprise data is siloed, fragmented and outdated.

Amid consistent pressure to move beyond monthly or quarterly reporting cycles to long-term strategic planning, financial planners juggle numerous spreadsheets and cumbersome legacy systems. Ultimately, limited resources lead to delayed analytics and skewed insights. In a poll conducted by Deloitte, only 11% of CFOs acknowledged the use of advanced analytics and centralized financial data for scenario planning, while 37% of the organizations accepted relying on manual processes to aggregate data and create financial models. Therein lie the challenges for efficient FP&A processes.

As finance teams usher in a new paradigm shift powered by cloud-based digital resources, they need faster analytics to inform business decisions at the speed of thought. After all, financial planning is expected to be agile, transparent and business-driven to move the bottom lines. But what’s holding them back, and how to remedy these challenges? Let’s find out.

Need for Self-Serve Analytics

Imagine a scenario where finance teams don’t need to knock on IT’s door to fish for actionable intelligence from the ocean of data. It’s this reality that self-serve analytics on Kyvos delivers with a simplified drag-and-drop interface. FP&A users can dig and dive as deep as they want into data and access granular details on their own, without needing any coding expertise.

Defining all the data in a commonly understood finance language helps every person to make sense of the numbers on their dashboards and get the same answers for a question, no matter how it is asked and by whom. Kyvos helps create an environment where a single source of truth prevails throughout the organization, offering a sweeping, 360-degree view of data.

With analytics always at their fingertips, FP&A experts can adapt quickly to changing market conditions and implement continuous planning, never missing an opportunity to grow.

No Access to Accurate and Real-time Data

Without consistent, organized and trustworthy information, financial plans can’t make sense or bring profits. FP&A teams need data in a methodical format to create intelligible reports. What if all the finance-related information is slotted in different locations and requires hours or even weeks of slow, effort-intensive integrating and sorting to be right on the button? There may be consequences like delayed fraud detection or cash shortages since the CFO had to wait several weeks to get a real-time view of the company and critical KPIs.

Enter ML-powered analytics enabled by Kyvos, where users can work with any amount of data—whether historical or streaming— emerging from any source, including disparate ones like IoT sensors, internal files, satellite data, external sources and others. Results are much faster with pre-processing going behind the scenes every time users fire their queries. And all this happening on the cloud with no restrictions on its speed or scale is cherry on the top.

Lack of Scalability

With time, data grows in an organization, leaving FP&A teams to crunch more numbers than they can handle in a normal workday. Whenever a new dataset comes in, legacy systems like SSAS or TM1 might not be able to refresh the reports instantly, leading to gaps in insights.

Fetching answers from such enormous incoming data is easier said than done, especially when analysts need details at the position level. Kyvos offers an intelligent solution by aggregating all the data, irrespective of its complexity and source, in advance to create highly performant data models. Resources can be scaled up during spikes and down in the lean periods to optimize costs.

Live connections between BI tools and data platforms can add more speed to the process. Being on the cloud comes in extremely handy here, too. Together, it’s like a nitro boost to the analytics without any exhausting manual work or custom coding requirements. Now, even if data grows incrementally, insights will be generated instantly.

Skill Gaps and Longer Learning Curves

Picture the FP&A team as a mechanic tasked to fix too many problems with too few tools. From the full-page reports to numbers doodled on the side margins, they can’t overlook any item. Handling multiple tasks like budgeting, forecasting and financial planning requires comprehensive skills. Toss in the necessary tech stacks to understand the underlying complexities of the data they are given, and it’s an even taller mountain to climb.

With 95% of organizations still relying on trusty spreadsheets to run analytics according to an EY survey, there’s a lot of catching up to do for FP&A professionals.

Most FP&A technologies and tools have a long learning curve, needing time these experts don’t have. While most legacy systems are highly resource-intensive and need dedicated personnel to operate them, cloud-native Kyvos can ease this burden. The platform integrates with existing tools to speed up analytics and requires no new skill sets or IT knowledge to demystify complicated reports.

Lack of Cross-Function Collaboration

Like most other departments in an organization, FP&A can’t work in isolation. Whether they need to make accurate revenue predictions or help supply chain managers to minimize stockpiling with better sales flow, collaborations can help accomplish financial goals without compromising overall efficiency. For example, with sales teams, they learn more about the revenue pipelines while marketing heads can help finance teams track metrics like conversion rates, costs of customer acquisition/retention, etc.

Data sharing can be a viable solution for cutting through the noise and finding common ground for collaboration between departments. A decentralized platform allowing them to use data as a product to be shared within teams as individual parcels can help.

With Kyvos, financial planning and analytics teams can build optimized, department-owned data models and share them across the enterprise for streamlined distribution of business-critical information and deeper analytics.

Concerns About Data Security

Financial data is critically important for an organization and must be kept under lock and key. Any leakage or breach can have devastating effects on the profits and bring authorities to the doorstep if there are compliance issues.

Hence, when accessing financial data to run variance reports, profit statements, cash flow reports, etc., FP&A teams need an ironclad security mechanism to ensure zero data infringement or misuse. Kyvos builds a multilayered architecture that ensures row- and column-level security with role-based access controls, encrypted passwords and visual audit logs for complete data auditability, keeping data protected at all levels.

Looking Ahead

Automation with AI/ML capabilities empowers FP&A teams to function with confidence in their data quality and think innovatively to deliver beyond the expected outcomes. With Kyvos at the forefront, they can take a leap of faith while moving their analytics to the cloud for faster insights. The platform integrates within any existing analytics architecture and needs minimal resources to deliver insights that can truly make a difference to the company’s overall performance.

Request a demo today to see how Kyvos ensures high-speed financial analytics at an unprecedented scale.