At the heart of any successful business lies an efficient finance function. But what sets apart exceptional finance teams from the rest? The answer lies in the quality of the data they rely on. Inaccurate or unreliable data can pave the way for flawed forecasts and financial statements, leading to detrimental business decisions. Conversely, high-quality data empowers finance professionals to make informed choices that can propel business profitability forward.
In this blog we dive into the pivotal role that data quality plays in shaping and elevating finance functions. Discover how OneStream's innovative platform has the power to transform your organisation's financial landscape. Prepare to venture on a journey where collaboration, innovation, and attention to detail converge to unlock the true potential of your finance function.
Data Quality – Why Does It Matter?
In today's interconnected digital world, data quality takes centre stage as a dominant factor, with businesses recognising its significance. By ensuring the accuracy of data, maintaining consistency, and prioritising relevancy, organisations possess the ability to unlock a multitude of invaluable benefits. From driving strategic business decisions to optimising operational efficiency, data quality acts as an essential foundation for achieving success in today's competitive landscape. These critical advantages are reinforced by a recent survey conducted by Wakefield Research, which reported that more than 31% of revenue is subjected to data quality issues.
These findings emphasise the critical importance of prioritising data quality in today's highly competitive landscape. By addressing concerns about data quality, organisations can unlock a world of opportunities. This steadfast dedication to data quality serves as a cornerstone for success, enabling organisations to navigate the complex challenges of the modern business environment with confidence and achieve their desired outcomes.
Data Quality and Machine Learning: What's the Connection?
Machine learning has become a powerful asset in the era of big data, as businesses are actively searching for innovative methods to ensure the accuracy and reliability of their data. Machine learning has risen as a dominant influence, granting businesses to utilise the immense potential of their data like never before.
By harnessing advanced algorithms and statistical models, machine learning is revolutionising the realm of data quality. Not only does it boost accuracy, but it also reveals hidden patterns, generates valuable insights, and automates intricate processes. As a result, machine learning offers a range of capabilities that were previously unimaginable.
Detecting Anomalies
Identifying anomalies is essential for maintaining data quality and avoiding inaccurate insights and flawed decision-making. Machine learning has emerged as a powerful tool in this regard, leveraging its ability to analyse extensive datasets effectively. By training models with historical data patterns, machine learning algorithms can pinpoint deviations from the standard, revealing outliers and errors. This empowers businesses to swiftly address these anomalies, rectify data inconsistencies, and uphold the integrity of their datasets.
Automating Data Cleaning
Machine learning is of immense value when it comes to data cleaning. It harnesses advanced algorithms to address prevalent issues with data quality, including missing values, duplicate entries, and inconsistencies in datasets. These systems detect and resolve these issues automatically, reducing the need for manual intervention and minimising the possibility of human errors. In addition to saving time and resources, it also ensures that our datasets are cleaner and more reliable, resulting in enhanced accuracy and quality of data.
Enhancing Predictive Accuracy
Accurate predictions rely heavily on the quality and completeness of the underlying data. Machine learning algorithms excel in enhancing predictive accuracy through the analysis of historical data, identifying relevant variables, and discovery of complex relationships. By leveraging past patterns and trends, these algorithms can provide precise predictions, empowering businesses to make well-informed decisions and gain a competitive advantage. With its capacity to handle large amounts of data and identify subtle patterns, machine learning enables heightened predictive accuracy, facilitating more precise forecasting and ultimately leading to improved business outcomes.
Businesses can unlock the full potential of their data, drive better decision-making, and ultimately gain a competitive advantage by incorporating machine learning into their data management processes. According to a survey on data quality improvement conducted by SnapLogic, the majority highlighted the importance of better data cleaning and improved data management as critical areas of focus. By leveraging machine learning algorithms, businesses can make better decisions, gain a competitive advantage, and thrive in today's data-driven world. Machine learning revolutionises data handling by automating data cleaning, detecting anomalies, and enhancing predictive accuracy, ultimately ensuring the reliability and high-quality of data that organisations need to succeed.
Enhancing Finance Functions through Data Quality: A Closer Look
In the world of finance, high-quality data is not just a luxury; it is a necessity. With accurate and reliable data, finance functions like controllership, tax, and financial planning and analysis (FP&A) can operate at their full potential, driving value across the organisation. Improved data quality has a profound impact on these crucial areas, leading to enhanced efficiency, accuracy, and decision-making.
1. Controllership
Data quality has various benefits for businesses. It enables timely reporting by providing accurate and reliable financial information to stakeholders. This streamlines the reporting process, reduces errors and delays, and facilitates real-time insights for better decision-making. According to FSN’s Global Survey, 62% of CEOs acknowledge that their data is timely reported. However, only 29% confirm that the reported data consistently maintains validity, completeness, and accuracy.
Improved data quality simplifies compliance assurance through standardised and consistent data, minimising the risk of non-compliance and associated penalties or audits.
Enhanced data quality supports strategic decision-making by offering clear insights into an organisation's financial health. Controllers can analyse high-quality data to assess profitability, identify cost-saving opportunities, and align strategic goals with financial capabilities, ultimately driving sustainable growth and optimising resource allocation.
2. Tax Management
On a monthly basis, 75% of finance functions encounter substantial accounting errors, as indicated by the FSN Global Survey. Data quality plays a critical role in tax management for organisations, as it enables accurate calculations by providing precise data, reducing the risk of errors or discrepancies in tax calculations and reporting. This leads to more reliable tax reporting, reducing the potential for penalties or compliance issues.
Having data of high quality guarantees compliance to intricate and ever-changing tax regulations. Implementing standardised data simplifies the process of managing taxes, facilitating the identification of relevant information and ensuring regulatory requirements.
Reliable data empowers tax professionals to perform comprehensive analyses and forecasts, identifying tax-saving opportunities and aligning tax strategies with financial goals. This ultimately leads to significant tax savings and increased profitability for organisations.
3. Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A)
Reliable and high-quality data yields multiple benefits for FP&A within organisations. It enables improved forecasting by providing accurate historical trends and current market conditions, leading to informed decision-making and robust financial planning.
Data quality aids in effective risk management by offering a clear view of potential risks and uncertainties, allowing organisations to develop strategies for risk reduction.
Additionally, integrated data promotes enhanced collaboration among departments, facilitating better communication, alignment of goals, and more efficient decision-making.
OneStream: Pioneering in Data Governance
A true pioneer in the field of data governance, OneStream stands out as a leading provider of integrated software solutions, especially with its cutting-edge data integration capabilities.
Standardisation and Validation
OneStream's commitment to data governance is evident through their focus on standardisation and validation. By implementing standardised processes, OneStream ensures the consistency and alignment of data inputs from diverse sources, eliminating discrepancies and preserving system integrity. Through thorough validation procedures, OneStream ensures data authenticity, enabling organisations to confidently rely on accurate and trustworthy information for decision-making. By prioritising standardisation, alignment, and verification, OneStream establishes a robust foundation for resilient data governance.
Monitoring and Compliance
With a strong emphasis on monitoring and compliance, OneStream enables organisations to maintain strict control over their data, guaranteeing its integrity and reliability. By providing innovative features and robust capabilities, OneStream enables users to track data changes, perform audits, drill-back to source data files or ledgers and enforce regulatory compliance. This meticulous approach guarantees exceptional levels of data quality and governance, allowing organisations to confidently make informed decisions.
Collaboration and Integration
OneStream enables seamless data integration from multiple sources, enabling confident decision-making through collaboration. Leveraging their expertise in data-integration and data-quality capabilities, OneStream establishes seamless connections with over 150 unique GL/ERP systems, delivering reliable and unified finance applications. OneStream's dedication to collaboration and integration establishes them as a trusted solution provider, unlocking the full potential of organisational data
Unleashing the Data Revolution: PRYZM's Data Integration Expertise for Business Success
Data quality is not just a nice-to-have but a strategic imperative for businesses. It is critical to achieving organisational success, especially in key financial functions. Surveys and industry studies underline the importance of data quality in achieving business goals.
OneStream platform's Integrated Financial Data Quality Management, combined with sensible machine learning capabilities, provide organisations with the necessary tools to effectively manage their data. By making an investment in data quality and harnessing the power of the OneStream, businesses have the ability to revolutionise their finance operations.
That's where PRYZM comes in. Here at PRYZM, we understand the importance of quality data and the insights it can generate for businesses. With our expertise and collaboration with OneStream, we offer comprehensive solutions to help organisations achieve seamless integrations and improved data quality. Together, we can transform finance operations, drive efficiency, foster innovation, and fuel growth.
Contact PRYZM today, and let us help you unlock the power of quality data for your organisation!