Is Your Bookkeeping & Accounting Giving You Data or Information?

Accounting isn’t just for number-crunchers. Managers, marketers, engineers—everyone needs financial insights to make informed decisions. Without a clear understanding of the financial insights, stakeholders are flying blind or operating without a full understanding of what’s happening in the business and their area

By presenting simplified accounting numbers, we arm non-accountants with the power to understand the financial implications of their actions. Spotting trends, identifying anomalies, and evaluating the impact on the bottom line become second nature for non-accountants. They can have the knowledge to ask intelligent questions and actively engage in financial discussions.

Presenting information that is accessible makes for an inclusive decision-making process where everyone has a seat at the table. Think about the benefits and improved conversation and decision making process your organization can have with a better informed team.

Investors are important stakeholders and may be key to growth and success.

To win them over, transparency is key. Simplified numbers help create a crystal-clear narrative that resonates with investors. While investors might understand large spreadsheets and financial jargon, why open yourself up to going down rabbit holes on esoteric terms and definitions that distract from the bigger picture?

Instead, presenting financial information in a format that even your grandma could understand allows investors to see the forest from the trees. Transparent, accessible reports build trust, attract investments, and can help your business thrive.

Your results visualized will show investors that you are on top of your KPI’s and tracking performance closely. Presenting clear and easy to understand numbers will separate you from the pack.

Numbers alone can be as exciting as watching paint dry. A full page of numbers can also be incomprehensible to the non-numerically inclined. For leaders who like to dig in, they might spend quite a bit of time trying to understand and unravel the trends. The time spent reviewing and analyzing the numbers might be better spent on product, sales, or other areas of the business.

We think we have the solution!

Visualizations transform dreary figures into captivating visuals packed with information. Our charts, graphs, and infographics bring data to life, allowing non-accountants to spot trends, compare performance, and unravel the financial story behind the numbers.

While fancy interactive dashboards that update automatically and allow users to toggle between different variables like time periods, locations, and products are great, sometimes simple and easy-to-build visuals are equally useful and powerful. One recommendation we like to make is color coding variances for budget vs actual comparisons. By simply coloring good, better-than-expected variances green and bad, worse-than-expected variances red, end users can quickly identify and focus on areas of the business operating outside of expectations. Simpler is often better.

Simple usually means more people with an organization can apply the same techniques and special Excel, Tableau, PowerBI and other program expertise may not be required. Also, a transition to visualizing data can be accomplished incrementally and need not be all done at once. While we love the high powered, specialized tools, Sanitas Accounting knows sometimes perfect is the enemy of good enough. It’s usually better to have an imperfect something that clearly communicates results than a hypothetical future program that does not exist.

In our experience, we have seen many attempts at data visualization go wrong do to complex process requirements, difficulty selecting the right BI product, and questions about ownership over processing and maintaining the dashboards and database. BI projects can be expensive and time-consuming. As such, we recommend starting small and with something before agreeing towards more full scale and powerful products and implementations.