Implementing Modern Reporting Tools – A Key to Profitability

cfonetwork • August 12, 2019
Allen Engstrom in a suit and tie is smiling in a black and white photo.

I use the term Instrumentation in my blog frequently to mean collecting, recording, measuring, and planning with relevant data in tailored analytic reports. In laymen’s terms, instrumentation is a powerful resource for business leaders to use in making decisions about their company. If your financial reports do not show actionable trends in profitability, sales, and cash-flow, you could be wasting your time. And unless you have a team of financial experts managing your analytics reports, there’s a good chance your instrumentation could use a fresh approach.

In the old days of business accounting, useful data locked away in hard-to-learn software silos, often not compatible with other aspects of the business’s financial tracking. Instrumentation wasn’t user-friendly, resulting in canned reports, manually formatted charts, and tedious spreadsheets. As a result, business owners drowned in meaningless data, with no actionable trends or control of the ocean of numbers.

With modern reporting technology, instrumentation has shifted to interactive dashboards available 24/7 on all of your screens. These user-friendly reports tie directly into various applications, unlocking data and putting it all in one convenient place. Business owners now have the ability to gain total control of their information and shape it to fit their needs. In this day and age, the key is no longer how to unlock your data, but rather defining what you want to see, when you want to see it, and how you want to see it.

Getting with the Times – And Becoming More Profitable

Imagine having perfect instrumentation – reporting that shows all the indicators of your business, tracking healthy aspects from sales and marketing, to operations, finance, HR and customer feedback. Imagine having powerful tools with the ability to drill into your profitability, cash flow, individual costs, see your financial statements in any level of detail, view trends, etc., all neatly delivered at the interval and frequency you desire.

It can be a surprisingly powerful motivator when you have a good dashboard for your business. You’ll find yourself striving to keep all the indicators “in the green”, and you know that if you do, your business will be running healthy and profitably.

A dashboard like this is worth its weight in gold – we know, because that’s our job. Our clients already have enough on their plate. You already have enough on your plate.

“We looked at a few third party accounting companies and what set CFO Network apart included their ability to simplify and present the data in a meaningful way with graphics so people like me can understand and take action based on projections before it’s too late.”

-Recent Quote from CFO Client

Don’t continue to suffer without the benefit of modern reporting tools. Contact us to talk about how to implement strong instrumentation and make your business more profitable.

Allen Engstrom

Owner, CFO Network

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