How CFOs use data and automation to optimize KPIs

Smart data and automation are used by small business owners to push their key performance indicators to new heights. Although the data deluge has created numerous opportunities to improve financial KPIs, managing that data and transforming it into actionable insights has proven challenging.

To fully capitalize on data-driven performance, small businesses must return to step one: obtaining enterprise data, to ensure that the right data is captured and data initiatives are aligned with the core strategy and business goals.?

Finance requires a stake in the data model.

The potential for leveraging data and advanced analytics to improve financial performance is immense; however, without a single source of truth, businesses can become trapped in a cycle of never-ending reconciliations and questionable data integrity, minimizing data's value to the business. Aligning goals and responsibilities is critical to data governance; as part of that process, finance and IT should both have a stake in the data model.

The right data, both internal and external, is everything.

Businesses must identify the right data from both internal and external sources in order to generate useful insights and execute on data-driven metrics. Whether you’re scaling your employee headcount or generating as much MRR as possible, understanding how internal and external metrics connect will help you identify the real needs of your business. Like the number of positive contacts in your marketing funnel and the number of daily sales are both metrics you can get from multiple sources and after a deep dive analysis, you’ll face the reality of your business with enough valuable data.

Progress is incremental, but that's okay.

Financial organizations should not let perfection stand in the way of progress toward KPI automation. Understanding how to define a requirement for a minimum viable metric or even your experience with doing the job manually can still provide some automation benefits. This still requires fine-tuning data capture processes, because ensuring high-quality data leads to accurate KPIs.

What tools are you using to scale your KPI automation? Let’s keep talking in the comments!?

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