Client Success Story: Better Decisions in Less Time, with Better Visualization!

The need for financial analysis is constant, and visibility into KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) is essential for decision making. When your systems have limitations in how you can visualize your data, your ability to make meaningful decisions is hindered.

In this Client Success Story, we outline how AAFCPAs helped Beaver Country Day School move beyond out-of-the box dashboards and transformed data into more meaningful and actionable reports & visualizations.

Background

Better Decisions in Less Time, with Better Visualization!As part of the annual financial statement audit, AAFCPAs’ IT Security Specialists, including our Certified Ethical Hacker, perform an IT General Controls Assessment. These assessments typically result in suggestions to enhance efficiency.

While performing the assessment, Vassilis Kontoglis, AAFCPAs Director, IT Security & Data Analytics, had meaningful conversations with Joanne McDaniel, Beaver’s CFO, about the organization’s financial reporting processes. Vassilis made recommendations that could streamline processes to save her team time and energy.

Challenges & Opportunities

Beaver uses Financial Edge and found that their financial reports out of the box were not particularly useful to their decision makers and interested parties. The data presentations did not call attention to or flag important metrics unless transformed and manipulated, which was time consuming. To make the data more useful, finance team members had to extract data from the system into excel, inspect, cleanse, and then transform the data into actionable insights. This was consuming hours of their team members’ productivity time, keeping them from focusing on higher value work like strategic planning.

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Financial analysis is a constant need for entities and the visibility into necessary financial indicators is essential for management decision making. Beaver’s new visualizations provide more meaning and utility for the finance department, management, and the Board.

Efficiencies are immense! The new solution eliminates time spent running and manipulating reports. The only interaction with the data is through the visualizations themselves. The Bot grabs data from sources, uploads to the cloud for availability to visualization, and Power BI reads and displays to users. In addition, because the human element was reduced, keystroke errors are eliminated, and clerical issues are reduced.

This solution replaces a time-consuming, highly-manual, repetitive process that will continue to save Beaver hours per week of administrative work and management analysis.

But most importantly, the new solution gives Beaver the power to efficiently interpret data and make meaningful business decisions in real time.

About the Author

Vassilis is a leader in AAFCPAs’ Business Process & IT Consulting Practice. He has 20+ years’ proven experience providing business intelligence, productivity, information risk management, and cybersecurity solutions. He is a critical resource in keeping clients and the firm on the forefront of transformative technologies while mitigating risks that come along with these advancements. Vassilis leads the delivery of Robotic Process Automation solutions at AAFCPAs. He understands the unique requirements to achieve RPA success, including proper design, planning, implementation, and governance. He works collaboratively with clients and cross-functional teams, and leverages his deep understanding of enterprise information systems, business logic, and structured inputs to automate rote processes and increase operational efficiency. Vassilis is also the leader of AAFCPAs’ automation center of excellence (CoE), an internal team that streamlines automation output, provides structure, and helps scale automation through the firm.