BeyondSquare FinAlyzer - Your partner for Financial Consolidation, Close, Analytics & Reporting

Recently I have been talking to owners of fast growing small businesses to understand a number of things: At what point of their growth should they hire a CFO If they are small enough not to have a CFO, do they hire external help (a virtual CFO) for financial insights & decision making How deep do small business owners get into the numbers of their business In the absence of a CFO, can a software tool to some extent bridge the gap, and provide actionable insights and aid decision making? What are the top 3 financial metrics/KPIs that a small business owner should track? Are there good and affordable financial intelligence tools available to serve this segment? If such tools are available, do business owners think it is important for them to invest in them? How much would they pay for such software? I have had interesting responses. A fellow entrepreneur was trying to get deep into numbers, and had created an impressive, if somewhat complex, reporting mechanism o...

Let’s say you got up this morning with a headache. You know from experience that it’s a small niggle, and it will go away on its own. But what if you got up tomorrow morning, and the headache got worse? If an aspirin doesn't help, you will surely go to a doctor, and most likely get some diagnostic checks done. A KPI (key performance indicators) dashboard is like a diagnostics report of various parameters that reflect the health of your business. KPI’s help you measure your business’s financial health. You can define KPIs for different areas of your business, from HR, Finance, Marketing to Operations. You can combine these KPIs to arrive at an overall health for your business. The Finance function is like the blood flowing through your body; it affects each part of it and keeps it healthy and oxygenated. Similarly, your company’s financial performance has a direct impact on every aspect of your business. Remember, that KPI’s and dashboards are not just for CFO’s...

For a business to perform successfully, basing decisions just on financial performance alone is not sufficient. A company has to track other business measures such as quality, customer satisfaction, brand preference, employee satisfaction and retention among others.  Having KPIs and monitoring them is becoming increasingly critical in today’s competitive and integrated business environment.   The best KPIs answer the following questions:         Are our activities aligned to our organizational goals     and how well are they executed?         Are our processes progressive or regressive?           Are we getting the expected results, if not, why?           Where is the money going and why is it going there?           Are all our key stakeholders happy with us? Why...

Financial performance measurement helps a company monitor its business health and define a road-map for its future. To properly evaluate this, one should find relevant measures, qualitative as well as quantitative. It is necessary to look beyond this year's budget, adopt the right metrics for measurement and to make sure that the measures are more futuristic and forward looking. The common traps that professionals tend to fall for while measuring financial performance are; Gaming the metrics - Sometimes, good performance is only on paper and the reality may be quite different. It is difficult to completely avoid the gaming of metrics, as someone who has learned how to doctor a metric without actually having to perform will often do just that. To create an effective system, you have to work with that facts rather than resort to wishful thinking and denial. Gaming the metrics can be minimised by varying the boundaries of measurement. Not benchmarking against the b...

Running a professional services company is complex. It requires effective selling as well as quality project delivery at the same time. Today, with customer being the king, the challenge is to balance customers, employees, partners and operations. It is also necessary to expand the business while keeping the revenue and costs aligned as well as providing the right tools for consultants to deliver supreme quality products. With over 200 possible measures for a services organisation, it’s critical to know which key performance indicators (KPIs) are essential for the successful running of a professional services company. Revenue Annual revenue per billable consultant - This depicts the company's total revenue divided by the number of billable consultants, which indicates the productivity of the consultant. This considered as one of the most important KPIs when measured along with labour cost. Maximize annual revenue per billable consultant. Annual revenue per empl...

I have consistently observed that my friends from Finance are working during the times that most others are on vacation. This is especially true during quarter and year ends. Financial Consolidation can get quite complex, and the process of consolidation could be quite manual, even in many large organizations. The CFO’s goal is undoubtedly to push for faster and accurate close cycles. Many of the issues I am listing below are common to most organizations I have had the opportunity to observe and interact with: The organization has grown through mergers and acquisitions, and the subsidiaries use disparate accounting systems and ERP’s, and thereby have different chart of accounts Massive co-ordination exercise with the various organizational entities to get data on time for consolidation Inter-company transaction reconciliation and elimination is a nightmare Foreign currency translation Multi-level entity hierarchy makes the consolidation complex Minority interests and goodwil...

Today’s business context and priorities call for CFO’s to have access to their organization’s financial performance reports at all times. An effective CFO will detect financial performance trends early in the cycle, analyze the same in light of the various dynamics involved and initiate necessary course corrections. Timely and correct decision making can turn the fortunes of an organization, and in turn that of the CFO. To make this possible, the CFO inevitably needs access to actionable insights anytime, anywhere. While what most CFOs track, are somewhat similar, but still each organization has to spend considerable thought and time on designing MIS requirements as per what is important for their business. Almost all CFO’s I have interacted with have put in a lot of thought in arriving at the metrics, KPIs and MIS formats. Irrespective of the investments they have made on a variety of Software Solutions, CFOs have often voiced these concerns in my conversations with them: We...