Financial Planning &Analysis
Qlik is used across industries to help finance organizations with operational and financial control. Traditional tools create a bottleneck in FP&A, where users are continually waiting on data from other departments and functions, only to manually compile that data from multiple sources and extensive use of Excel. Limited analysis actually that takes place. Qlik enhances the analysis of forecast assumptions and outputs, as well as budgets and financial plans. Finance users can freely explore business unit performance against financial metrics and blend “top-down” & “bottom-up” forecasting visibility. The result is eliminating an inconsistent, resource-intensive financial reconciliation process, to streamline operational and financial planning for optimizing budget allocations and increased revenue from improved financial decisions.
Expense Management
Expense management allows business to the opportunity to identify cost reduction areas under the constant pressure “to do more with less”. Cost centers and managers generally have no visibility to what they are getting charged for based on allocations of direct (project staff or travel) and indirect expenses (rent or administration staff). With Qlik, business users can freely investigate costs and expenses across multiple geographies, business lines, and systems, to understand detailed spending trends and identify efficiency opportunities. Qlik allows users to eliminate their reliance on end-of-month, high-level static reports, and managers will have the ability to not only proactively manage expenses as they occur, but also assess the true cost of ownership and real value of contracts and projects.
Revenue & Profitability Management
This solution area also has some overlap into the Sales LOB. Profitability management is all about maximizing revenue, market share, & tradeoffs. Financially, the question asked is “how can we get the most out of every unit”? There currently exists a burdensome navigation through a massive amount of transactional (market, client, account, etc) data. Companies are constantly searching to increase margins and access pricing and growth models against changing market behaviors. Analysts can test pricing scenarios, compare estimates vs. actuals, and get the views they need of information, on-the-fly, on any device. This puts the focus back on business decisions that drive profitability, instead of the burdensome process of manually consolidating and analyzing information.
Cash-Flow & Balance Sheet Management
This solution area revolves around the cash conversion cycle (Accounts Receivable & Accounts Payable) as well as the enhancin g report and management of general balance sheet assets, liabilities, and equity. A/R & A/P are often a manual process with paper-based communications, and poor control over financial supply chain. Companies play catch-up on growing transaction volumes a small staff attempts to collect on aged accounts. The faster the aged receivables turn into current assets, the greater the liquidity. Accounts payable is also typically a small staff; however, there is tremendous value in the relationships of the vendor base and external customer. The management of the balance sheet generally produces and itemizes financial data but lacks the indicators, visually highlighted pressure points, rapid data integration with multiple systems and tools.
Compliance & Risk Management
Qlik helps reduce the internal analytical and data silos that prevent business leaders from gaining an enterprise-wide view of compliance and risk. Qlik allows finance and risk managers to rapidly integrate data from multiple sources, and align governance models with business for greater overall transparency. Business users can freely explore large volumes of risk data and quickly respond to unplanned inquiries, minimizing the manual efforts related to custom risk reporting. Auditors can use automated sampling techniques within QV as a means to enhance investigation and drastically speed up the process securely, without affecting current business processes. Typically, compliance models do not align with business strategies and hinder them, rather than enhance them. With Qlik, users can enhance existing internal controls and mitigate different levels of risk before they occur and enable the business to react immediately, for an overall reduction of fines, penalties, and fraud. The ad-hoc compliance and risk investigation increases profitability through unassociated and unexpected business discoveries.
