Data-driven business insights vs. standard financial reports

"I am tired of getting pages and pages of reports from my finance team. All I need to know is how my business is doing and what changes I need to make to improve performance."

That comment came from a CEO of a $20M organization. It is not unusual. It is, in fact, the most common complaint we hear from leadership teams about their finance function.

The Expectation Gap

Finance teams love data. They are trained to present comprehensive information, tables, graphs, schedules, variance summaries. The package is thorough. The package is also 30 pages long and takes 45 minutes to walk through.

Business owners and leadership teams care about the data but are primarily interested in outcomes and the drivers of those outcomes. They want to know: what happened, why it happened, and what we are going to do about it.

Those are different questions than "here is all the data."

What Happened When We Fixed It

One client's head of finance presented results to the executive team every month with a 30-page reporting package. The executive team's response was yawns. Lots of them.

We replaced the 30-page package with a one-page weekly summary covering three things: why performance was as it was, what the underlying drivers of revenues and costs were, and a specific recommendation on what needed to change.

The monthly meetings changed immediately. Instead of a presentation, it became a discussion. Instead of explaining the past, the team was making decisions about the future.

That is the difference between financial reporting and financial intelligence.

What Financial Intelligence Looks Like

Financial intelligence is not less data. It is better-organized data, with a clear point of view.

• It answers "why" before leadership has to ask
• It identifies the two or three things that actually moved the needle this week
• It tells you what changed compared to last week, last month, and the plan
• It ends with a recommendation or a decision, not a summary

The Test

Ask yourself: after your last monthly finance review, did your leadership team leave the meeting knowing exactly what decisions to make? Or did they leave with more questions than they started with?

If it is the latter, your reporting is working for your finance team, not for your business.