When it comes to business operations, the finance team is in charge of scanning through data, finding opportunities, forecasting future trends, and presenting their insight to higher-ups in a way that is easy to understand. Alongside knowledge of a range of financial modeling systems, finance teams also need to know a great deal about effective data management.
The global data market will be worth nearly $78 billion by 2025, with finance teams needing to understand how to manage all the data they interact with in order to draw insights. With the sheer scale of this project, these teams need to understand data management, compliance, and regulation practices as a core part of their job role.
In this article, we’ll dive into the world of data management, exploring how finance teams can better structure and interact with their data to get more from it. We’ll touch on every aspect of the data pipeline, from how they can improve storage and management to how they can remedy common visualization problems.
Let’s dive right in.
How To Get More from Financial Data
To best serve your business, financial teams need to be able to draw as much insight from their data as possible. Beyond just creating random insight, everything they generate must serve a specific purpose and deliver value to their business. With that in mind, they must follow the best practices in modern data management to ensure they can keep up with new influxes of data.
Here are our top strategies that finance teams can use to innovate how they manage and interact with their data:
- Centralize Data Management
- Leverage Automation for Compliance
- Partner with Data Teams
Let’s break these down further.
Centralize Data Management
The single most impactful thing your business can do when it comes to improving the efficacy of your finance teams’ data management is to ensure that all data is centralized. The best way to do this is to work with a single source of truth, like a centralized cloud data warehouse that stores all the data for your business.
When comparing leading cloud data warehouse providers, like Apache Pinot vs Druid, you can see that you’ll be able to store vast quantities of data, scaling your store to meet your requirements. Especially when it comes to managing financial data, which is often real-time and will continuously flood into your company, a cloud approach is by far the most effective.
Centralizing your data creates one singular repository where all of your finance team members can access recent data. This will avoid any circumstances in which several team members work on the same data without realizing it, and will help to follow good data practices to ensure current and accurate data sources.
When it comes to generating insight, a centralized repository is a must for finance teams.
Leverage Automation for Compliance
One area that consistently slows businesses down when it comes to data management is poor data compliance management. Data compliance is integral in the world of data management. Without compliance, businesses could face significant fines, be unable to work with some types of data, and could leave themselves open to security risks.
That said, compliance is also one of the most tedious parts of interacting with large data repositories because it represents several additional steps that teams have to take when interacting with data. As time goes on, territories and governments will only continue to add more compliance regulations, making this an important aspect to consider as soon as possible.
One way to improve data compliance to reduce how much time it takes your finance and data teams is to incorporate a range of automation tools and systems. Automation software can be directly integrated into your chosen data platform and will help you follow specific data requirements.
For example, you can find integrations that automatically source data from your connected platforms and bring them to your cloud data warehouse. This will instantly eliminate any manual processes of moving data and will give your finance teams more time to focus on analysis.
You can also find tools that help with data compliance by eliminating the most time-consuming tasks. By utilizing automation where possible, everyone who comes into contact with data will have a much easier time and won’t have to worry about whether or not they’re following the correct compliance initiatives.
Your business could take this one step further by making sure that all of your finance team has compliance training before they ever engage with data. Providing a few sessions that explain what data compliance is and how to properly follow and enforce these regulations will ensure your team is always on the right track.
Compliance isn’t going anywhere, so the sooner your finance teams take control of it, the better.
Partner with Data Teams
While finance teams will often engage with data, analyze it, and draw insight from it, they are not the actual owners of the data. On the contrary, it will be your data teams that actually manage your cloud data warehouse and ensure that everything is running smoothly.
With that in mind, some organizations experience issues between their data teams and finance teams, seeing them clash when it comes to ownership and management responsibilities. To avoid any of these scenarios, it’s a good idea to maximize exposure between these teams.
Of course, by centralizing your data, you’re already on track to doing this. However, you can take this one step further by ensuring that both teams follow the same practices and processes when it comes to interacting with data. While this may seem time-consuming, it will ensure there are fewer problems down the line and help your entire data pipeline run smoothly.
What’s more, requiring all parties to follow the same processes will help to improve data observability, which will ensure that all financial data is accurate when it comes time for analysis.
Final Thoughts
Data has quickly risen to become the most valuable resource that a business has at its disposal. Without data, teams are unable to create effective insight and deliver value to their business. A continual stream of information helps companies to pinpoint opportunities, discover hidden value, and move toward successful business practices.
Nowhere is this more true than in finance teams, that are directly tasked with finding ways to maximize profit and minimize expenditure. By utilizing the actionable tips and strategies in this article, finance teams will be able to get more from their data and build more effective data processes in their operations.
Best of luck honing your data management and interaction strategies in 2024!
