Visual dashboards drive decisions that fuel firm growth

Data is essential to nearly every business these days—from bakeries relying on sales trends to order the right amount of ingredients to physician's offices mining Google analytics to market to potential patients. Data has always been key for accountants: the original spreadsheet jockeys. But in today's fast-moving, tech-driving environment, a spreadsheet is definitely not the best tool to store, access, and analyze your firm's data.

Making the most of your firm's data is an often-overlooked element of an optimized workflow. Forward-looking firms know that automated accounting workflow software can help them leverage data to make better business decisions that will increase efficiency, productivity, and profitability.

To support your firm's business goals, it may be time to consider the bigger picture when dealing with data.

Don't drown in unstructured data

Spreadsheets may be an accountant's workhouse tool, but they're not without their limitations.
When you're using disparate sources of unstructured data that aren't tied together by an integrated software solution, it's easy to miss an important piece of information. It also can be challenging to distinguish which data is valuable and why because it's much harder to track trends.

If your firm isn't using an integrated data dashboard as part of its tax and accounting workflow, you may find that you:

• Spend so many hours every month compiling data from multiple sources that you never get around to analyzing it
• Have to delay and restate reports because of time-consuming reporting processes, which can impact your profitability
• Struggle to understand pages and pages of static data without spending hours on lengthy analysis

Drive decisions with dashboards

Every tax and accounting professional knows you need to see the big picture and every moving part of a client engagement. A broader view of how all projects play out allows stakeholders to spot trends and identify project-specific problems early when there's still time to take action.

It's a view you can't get from even the most comprehensive, complicated spreadsheet. To truly be able to use information insights to drive decisions, you need the highly visual dashboards that turn your accounting workflow software into a data-driven machine. Whether you want to benchmark business performance with real-time key performance indicators (KPIs) or leverage data to know if and when it's time to scale up your business model, easy-to-read visuals provide valuable insights you can rely on.

Dashboards integrated with your existing technologies and powered by your internal data put your big picture in focus and give you:

• More time to analyze the information thanks to integrated systems that share data and report-building time
• Clear visibility with near real-time data so you can focus on taking action to improve KPIs
• At-a-glance understanding with data visualization, drill-down, and filtering capabilities to help find critical insights
• Quicker decision-making ability, freeing up time for staff to respond to changing priorities and make adjustments critical to engagement success

Workflow automation software helps harness data

With workflow automation software from Wolters Kluwer, your team can harness data to make decisions that drive growth rather than drowning in data.

Using data-driven dashboards will help your firm be more successful, but there are so many more ways that optimizing your workflow can support your goals of peak efficiency and client visibility.

Workflow solutions from Wolters Kluwer can help your firm rethink its routing sheets, minimize email fatigue, create consistent processes, use dashboards to drive decisions, and promote accountability through visibility. Learn more now.