Choosing the Right Financial Analytics Platform: Key Features t…

Maximize business decisions from your FP&A tools with these four features.

Photo: Campaign Creators

Financial planning and analysis (FP&A) tools can help leaders analyze their companies’ financial data and make key business decisions more effectively.

If operating expenses are drastically higher than usual, a business might have gaps in forecasting, budgeting, or spending. Likewise, steadily rising revenues may indicate it’s time to think about business expansion.

When analyzing large amounts of financial information from disparate business units, you need an FP&A platform that keeps data organized, clearly visualized, and available for stakeholders to access on demand. Doing so improves the quality of insights you generate when making business decisions.

So, what are the top features to look for in a financial analytics platform?

Safeguarding financial data against cybersecurity risks is crucial to mitigating breaches that could compromise its sensitivity, privacy, or integrity.

Examples of financial data at risk for cyber attacks include:

Personally identifiable information (PII), such as social security numbers, tax information, and employees’ residential addresses

Proprietary information, such as licensing agreements, budgets, and projections

Consumer information, such as credit card numbers and transactional histories

The precise data security or privacy your business must implement will likely depend on your specific industry or the types of data you’re dealing with.

So, how can you tell if your data will be safe from privacy or security risks when using a financial analytics platform?

One way is to review the compliance requirements that will apply as you use the platform.

For example, businesses in customer-facing industries whose analytics platforms handle customers’ payment data must comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) guidelines to protect these data 24/7.

Similarly, businesses that conduct analytics on healthcare data must secure these data with the safeguards recommended by frameworks like HIPAA or HITRUST.

Organizations that handle financial data whose subjects are covered by privacy laws like the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR) or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) must also ensure their analytics platforms comply with these regulations to avoid non-compliance penalties.

Beyond meeting industry-, location-, or customer-specific compliance requirements, financial analytics platforms should also have baseline security features that prevent perpetrators from accessing—and compromising—sensitive data.

For example, building role-based access controls into an analytics platform ensures only employees with business authorization can view or manipulate sensitive data. In case of security gaps such as insider threats, it’s much faster and easier to identify the source of the risk to both the platform and the data.

It’s also crucial that a financial analytics platform integrates seamlessly within your organization’s existing infrastructure to minimize additional time and resource investment into optimizing the integration.

Many widely-used analytics platforms leverage application programming interfaces (APIs) to automate various processes that include:

Pulling data from disparate sources

Generating summarized, actionable insights

Creating customized reports for various stakeholders

It’s often challenging to find APIs that integrate across multiple applications, especially if operating on-premises and in the cloud. And that's why it's crucial to determine if it makes sense to integrate certain APIs or platforms into your FP&A workflow.

From the get-go, it might be challenging to find an all-encompassing platform that smoothly integrates into your current infrastructure. Factors like your deployment preferences or data flow requirements may influence your choice of platform.

On one hand, you can develop APIs in-house and tailor them to your organization’s needs. However, that requires significant technical resourcing to build, test, or deploy the API—ensuring the final version of the API performs as expected.

At the same time, it’s critical to ensure the integrations or platform features you're building into your existing FP&A infrastructure function smoothly, without constraining data from moving across systems, applications, or servers and interrupting business operations.

That's where expert guidance comes in to ensure you invest in the right API or platform for your FP&A needs and achieve the return on investment your company expects.

If you’re looking to invest in a financial analytics platform for extensive, long-term use, then the platform must be easy to use and intuitive, even for less tech-savvy users. The more complex the platform is to navigate, the longer it will take for employees to complete tasks, find information, or analyze reported data.

On the other hand, a customized UX translates into higher productivity and better time-to-value outcomes. As such, your preferred vendor should be willing to customize certain aspects of the UX to your company’s needs.

For example, when users collaborate on analytics, they should be able to multitask within the platform. Whether employees are text or video chatting while working on a specific project, the platform’s UX should streamline both processes without hindering productivity.

As it is, completing analytics-related tasks is mentally tasking. So, if users have an additional task of deciphering how to navigate the platform they are using to complete these tasks, there is a risk of lower productivity.

Investing in a platform with great UX can help increase ease of use, simplify the path to completing cumbersome tasks, and streamline analytics workflows—regardless of tech savviness.

Another important consideration for choosing a financial analytics platform is the ease of scaling up or down as your company grows.

A platform that provides quick access to data reports will be handy in smaller start-up environments where employees wear multiple hats with various responsibilities, leaving them little to no time to handle IT issues. Specialized vendor IT support may then be required to help navigate these types of issues.

However, as a company grows and evolves, it will have more specialized business units to complete critical tasks and may require fewer platform add-ons.

For instance, a company can rely on internal resourcing to provide platform IT support without needing the services of a platform vendor. Furthermore, customized dashboards would significantly improve communication and visibility across different teams as they make data-driven decisions.

Scalability will play a crucial role when it comes to platform deployment.

If a business anticipates growing from a single site to multiple, cloud-deployed financial analytics platforms may be more feasible since they can streamline communication and enable users to complete tasks faster, regardless of location.

Of course, extrinsic factors like your budget and growth rate may determine when and how you scale your FP&A. Regardless, it's important to plan accordingly so you're not unprepared when the time comes.

A robust financial analytics platform should provide data security and privacy, seamless integration, a user-friendly experience, and scalability. Although there are more features to consider, the above features provide a great starting point for evaluating which platform might work for your company’s needs.

By investing in the right financial analytics platform, you will gain valuable insights from your financial data and make effective business decisions.

With the guidance of an FP&A tech expert, your business can augment its existing financial analytics capabilities to achieve long-term success.

Want to have Timothy Musoke's latest posts delivered to your inbox?

Subscribe