Most finance teams aren't short on data. What they're short on is clarity, too many reports, unclear ownership, and a lot of time spent building things that may or may not be driving any real decisions. Here are seven practical ways to improve your Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics environment.
01 Find out which reports are eating your team's time
Start by figuring out where your team is spending their hours when it comes to reporting. Which reports take the longest to build? Which ones get rebuilt every month from scratch? Once you know that, pick the worst offender and automate it. That's your quickest win.
02 Do an audit of what's being used
If you have a lot of reports in your environment, chances are a good portion of them aren't being used at all. Pull usage data if you have it or just ask the teams. Find out what's being opened, what's being ignored, and what's being maintained for no real reason. Doing this will prevent your team from spending time on reports nobody looks at. You might also find opportunities to consolidate a few into one. This alone can significantly reduce the noise in your environment.
03 Chase back which reports are driving decisions
This is a slightly different question than usage. A report can be opened every day without influencing any decisions. Sit down with leadership and the teams and figure out: which reports are genuinely being used to make calls? Which KPIs are people looking at before they act? This helps you understand where your analytics environment is delivering the most value, and where it's not.
04 Build one source of truth
If different people in your organization are pulling numbers from different systems and getting different answers, that's a trust problem. The fix is to bring your data together, whether that's a Lakehouse, a data warehouse, or a well-governed data model, so that everyone is working from the same place. The goal isn't just to centralize data, it's to create a model that teams can use for self-service reporting without having to go back to IT or analytics every time they need a number.
05 Define the KPIs that matter the most to the Business
If you're struggling to prioritize which reports to focus on first, try sitting down with leadership and agree on maybe 10 – 20 KPIs that they care about the most. Define the formulas for those KPIs as a team, make sure everyone agrees on how they're calculated, and build your reporting around those.
06 Audit what decisions are being made with data — and which ones aren't
Another very useful exercise is to map out what decisions your finance team and the rest of your organization need to make regularly, and then answer the question: is data being used to make those decisions? In a lot of environments, the answer is no, and in many cases, it is not because the data doesn't exist, but because it's not surfaced in a way that supports the decision. Finding and closing those gaps will help your analytics be more valuable.
07 Revisit your data strategy and rewrite your decisions
If it's been a while since anyone asked, "what is this all this data for?", it's worth doing that exercise again. Not in a theoretical way, but practically, you can write down the decisions your organization needs to make and use that list to evaluate whether your current data setup supports them. Your reports and dashboards should trace back to a real decision someone is trying to make. If they don't, that's a signal to revisit.