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For team members responsible for financial planning and analysis, emailing core financial information on spreadsheets or sharing them via SharePoint (or another collaboration tool) are risky security practices that could expose your company to cybercrime. There are also governance and security concerns. All the typical problems that arise with spreadsheets come into play here, but even more so when trying to use a spreadsheet as a makeshift database. Compound this issue with formula errors between versions and broken links inherent to spreadsheet sharing. As a result, the original spreadsheet becomes out of sync, since different teams have used different versions with no one accessing a common and current source. Far too often, coworkers share a spreadsheet that gets updated over time. This approach also creates a data consistency issue.
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And since it’s also very manual, it’s not repeatable, so when new analysis is needed three weeks later, that difficult and time-consuming process has to be done again. This data gathering process is much more difficult and time consuming than the actual data analysis. Before conducting any analysis however, the data must be merged, most likely by trying to use a spreadsheet like a database, and then building metrics or analyses from that. They may even pull in additional data that was obtained on an ad-hoc basis from elsewhere. And again, the data is often scattered, which means staff must first manually gather the data before they can even start their analysis.įor instance, due to the use of multiple sales applications, businesses likely have access to several sources of data, including marketing or financial data extracts in a CSV or Excel file format. If there were, data or business analysts could do rapid, self-service data visualization, and analysis.
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The data is readily available but there is no available tool that provides fast access. This is often due to a probable lack of analytics capabilities. Typically, getting the desired information or insights your business needs to compete often takes too long and requires too much effort. With data scattered throughout an organization, getting integrated information in a timely manner can also prove to be problematic. The ability to derive certain metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) from data can be difficult. How can data analytics improve business decisions?