Making the Most of Your Business Data?

Making the Most of Your Business Data?

Are you recording, measuring, and analysing enough of the data being generated by your business?

With so many apps and digital solutions now available to businesses, there’s a wealth of valuable data to trawl through – and plenty of hidden insights from which you can benefit.

Here are 5 ways to get more insights from your business data

1. Track your business finances

Managing your business accounts used to be something you left to your finance director. But with cloud accounting now the norm, every business has 24/7 online access to detailed information about its financial position and performance. Deeper analysis and insights are usually available at the click of a button, helping you spot the pitfalls and potential opportunities.

Your accounting platform can show you the following:

Profit & loss reports and balance sheets, with real-time data to help decision-making
Cashflow forecasts and projections to help plan your future cash position
Budget tracking and spending reports to stay in full control of your expenditure.

2. Review your credit score

The credit risk rating the big credit agencies give your company can greatly impact your ability to borrow. A high-risk rating will mean banks and other lenders will be reluctant to offer you funding. And suppliers will be less open to offering you trade credit.

Some credit bureaus, like Experian, now offer ways to check your business credit score. With a better understanding of your credit data, you can take action to improve your score.

To get in control of your credit position, you should:

Find out your current credit score and how this is impacting your ability to borrow
Check out your payment history and take action to improve your performance
Regularly check this credit data to track improvements or drops in your score

3. Monitor your sales and marketing data

Steady sales revenues are a must for any business that wants to grow, but how much oversight do you have over your historic and future sales data? Using a sales and marketing platform like Salesforce helps you track your sales, campaigns, and customer relationships – giving you a goldmine of data to sift through and analyse:

Key data areas to analyse will include:

Which products and/or services are making the most sales, and why
Which customer demographic is the biggest spender, and why they’re advocates
Which campaigns are delivering the best return on investment (ROI)

4. Track your staff performance

Your people are one of the company’s most important assets. But do you really know how well your employees are performing or how engaged they are with the goals of the business? Today’s HR software makes it easy to set core skills and capabilities and track how each team member performs over the year.

As an employer, you can:

Set performance and training targets, and see how your employees are tracking
Run satisfaction surveys and staff feedback to check in on team engagement
Use your data to drive improved performance and happiness in your workforce

5. Measure your performance against targets

One of the big benefits of tracking your business data is the ability to measure your performance against a given target. Whether a budget target for a new department or a sales target for a new marketing campaign, you have the performance data at your fingertips. This helps you motivate the team, work towards a common goal, and ‘gamify’ your progress as a business.

Transparency can work wonders for motivation if you share these targets and performance data with your people at monthly team meetings. When your employees, management, and executive team aim for the same goals, you’re a more effective team.

Talk to us about getting more from your data

Transforming your company into a digital business may seem like the end of the process. But the reality is that getting in control of your data sharing, analytics, and performance tracking is the genuine goal for any ambitious business in 2022.

We can help you connect your app stack and focus on analysing the most important data for business success.