Missed insights: Why your finance team needs better reporting tools

What is the finance team’s main purpose?

Bookkeeping, managing cashflow and expenses: when we think of the finance team, we tend to think of traditional administrative tasks. 

But ask a CFO, and they might have a very different view.

“The finance team should be integral to the business – helping sales to sell more and senior management to make better decisions”.

Cameron Rollason, CFO, FVS

Putting Accounts Payable in pole position

Your finance team is capable of far more than inputting time sheets and ‘business as usual’ reporting. In fact, two of the top challenges to emerge in a survey of accountants across Australia and New Zealand were: ¹

1. Finding time to identify opportunities and add value.
2. Obtaining correct data and information on a timely basis.

With the right tools, your finance team can become your organisation’s most valuable asset – spotting future investment opportunities, potential risk areas for your business and trends in sales that could point to new product and services.

The ERP that empowers your finance

Wiise ERP offers fast-growing businesses some of the most powerful reporting tools on the market. Wiise provides the multi-dimensional reporting capabilities that finance needs to both drill-down into the data detail and pan back to spot bigger picture trends and warning signs. 

In Wiise – The Australian ERP for Microsoft 365, award-winning accounting technology journalist, Sholto Macpherson, reveals how accounting teams can automate, standardise and speed up finance processes by aligning Wiise ERP with their existing Microsoft 365 tech stacks. 

Here are just some of the key highlights from the guide:

1. More time to look at the data 

It’s estimated that 80% of finance tasks can be automated but only around a third have been.²  Wiise offers teams a wide range of automation capabilities, all designed to eliminate manual, time-consuming tasks so that your team can focus on strategy. From approval workflows for expenses and purchase orders, to the ability to pull and send data to multiple applications, Wiise speeds up the menial jobs that drain and distract some of your most valuable team members.

2. See the big (and small) picture  

Wiise can take data from many business applications, automatically clean and format the data, and use business intelligence to generate insights and recommendations. Live, interactive dashboards offer an unrivalled granular reporting view, enabling finance teams to drill down into the detail or see a holistic view of sales numbers and trends that can show where the business is headed.

3. Predict the future

Wiise utilises built-in Azure AI to analyse large sets data and predict every time a customer is going to pay late. It can create cashflow forecasts and predict the cash at hand over the next couple of months and whether a company can make payroll. Knowing what’s on the horizon not only helps your finance team to flag risks, but it can also buy them enough notice to suggest ways to avoid them in future.

4. Reports ready when you need them

One of the reasons that finance teams tend to struggle with work/life balance (one of the other top findings from the survey) is the time it takes to prepare vital monthly reports. If they aren’t ready in time, the team has to stay late to ensure they are. Wiise offers finance teams the ability to generate recurring, automated reports, scheduled for whenever you need them. This saved one Wiise customer 5 days a month on P&L reporting alone.

Better business insights? That’s just the beginning.

Get ready to make better business decisions. Find out how Wiise can arm your finance team with the tools they need to guide the business and give them back time. 

Discover:

• What Wiise can do for your business
• How Wiise integrates seamlessly with your existing Microsoft investments
• Examples of how Wiise combined with leading Microsoft products can offer significant user and business advantages

Download Wiise – The Australian ERP for Microsoft 365 or find out more about Wiise accounting and financial management features.

¹Wolter Kluwer (2022) Wolters Kluwer Annual Accounting Survey reveals top 5 challenges and 2023 goals.

²Grant Thornton (2022), Top 5 issues for CFOs in 2022.