CFO Rapid Fire Business Analytics

Out of Accounting & Financial Statement Drudgery into Business Intelligence

Gone is the drudgery of analyzing accounting and financial data. It's time to blend Data Art and Data Visualization to provide clarity and excitement to a previously monotonous and arduous task. We provide Business Intelligence!

Let's assume you are a owner/manager who oversees 2, 5, 25, 50 restaurants. How could you possibly have the time to review financial statements, sift through the numbers, and make sense of it all? In every sector, managers have been inundated with information from every available source. Technological advancements have provided data to everyone, everywhere, at any time. However, it's not always easy to quickly identify or pinpoint exactly what is happening for the whole or individual segments. Reports are issued but they cannot be tailored, narrowed, or even drilled into. Examining what is driving your results is time consuming and laborious.

Check out our Data Visualizations! Managers can now look at a snapshot of their business broken down by period, week,quarter, week, day part, store, financial statement account, etc. The possibilities are limited by the user's creativity and to some extent available data. Using the command bars surrounding the visualization, one is able to narrow, broaden, or drill into various parameters. Report users have the ability to interact with the data. Compare, contrast, dive into detail, all controllable at their fingertips; anytime, anywhere!

Want to Trend your Store Comp Sales? By Week? By Period? By Day Part?

Want to Trend your Average Wage Rate? By Week? By Period?

 

These are static illustrations just to tempt you. Imagine the data you could see into! We want to end the accounting drudgery and provide business intelligence which allows you to visualize your business in a whole new light. As Stephen Few, author and consultant, states "People make better decisions when they're based on understanding. For information to be understood, it must often be presented in visual form. This is because patterns, trends, outliers, and a sense of the whole as opposed to its parts require a picture for the human brain to see and comprehend. Data visualization is essential. Visualizing data effectively is vital. "

It's time to start making decisions based on Business Intelligence!

“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” – E.M. Forster

Business Intelligence (BI) is swirling all around us, consuming much of our daily interactions. Data is growing faster and exponentially. Leading us to the question: "How do I know what I think until I see what I say"? The answer lies within Data Visualization. What we do with all our intelligence, or better yet how quickly we analyze, pivot, drill deeper, visualize and interact with our data will ultimately determine our success in this BI World. Gartner states organizations continue to turn to BI as a vital tool for smarter, more agile and efficient business. We all understand the basics for which BI provides measurements, processes, methods and visualizations which can be easily viewed, analyzed and understood. But, confusion still remains in many users minds regarding what is the "right" BI tool for their company?

Consider the example of the Pilot's instrument panel. The instruments are based upon predetermined information, queries in a top-down approach. The pilot cannot unearth answers as to why the panel shows what it shows; it simply accepts the answers, continues forward and makes decisions based on a one-sided graphical representation. Now, consider if the pilot were able to drill deeper and interact with the data. For example, why is my oil pressure where it is? What if the pilot could interact with the data by adjusting for weather conditions, comparing to previous flights in similar situations, and basically making decisions based on real results in real time? Imagine the insights that pilot could gain. How would his decisions change? You are the pilot of your company, apply this to your data and suddenly, decisions are based on intelligent automation rather than simply performance measurements.

CFO Rapid Fire will answer your question: "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" As Seth Grimes, owner and principal of a business analytics consulting firm, said, "This technology helps a spectrum of data users create graphical magic…Enhanced reality is the future, already possible to an extent via our mobile devices, where we're presented with situational relevant information that enables better-informed decision making." It is time to create "Magic with your Data" and "See what you Say!"

Taming the Surf of Big Data: Wake of Splunk IPO

Everywhere we turn the words Big Data are clamoring for our attention. Clients are questioning if this is something they need to concentrate efforts towards; actually, do they even have it?? Regardless of whether they are a company with petabytes of machine data, or one with merely 750GB of scattered data, these companies are all faced with "their own" Big Data. Determining which business intelligence system will provide them clarity in a consolidated and logical repository is the key to taming this surf of Big Data.

Yesterday was an exciting day in the business intelligence world. The Splunk IPO gave credence to fact that Big Data is not going away anytime soon. In fact, like Moore's Law proves more often true than not, data begets data so it's only going to grow bigger, much like the ocean surf.

Here are some questions clients should be asking relative to Big Data:

1. What data am I trying to capture?
2. What do I want to accomplish with this data?
3. What insight do I hope to glean from this data?
4. What infrastructure do I need to harness this data?

CFO Rapidfire is poised to tackle these questions with our clients and make sense out of "their" Big Data. We are excited about this data mining and opportunity that exists for our clients to capture long awaited data which could transform their decision making.

Instalytics: Bringing Clarity to Data Deluge

Let's take the saying "a Picture is Worth a Thousand Words" and apply it to Data Visualization. What is your financial data telling you? Can you intuitively tell with relative ease? Can you manipulate scenarios or parameters to highlight what is happening in your business? Dig deeper without becoming buried in data? What about setting up alerts so you can tell if a project is growing successfully or about to go off the rails?

Leaders at the recent Restaurant Leadership Conference discussed many topics but a resounding theme was HELP! We have Volume, Velocity and Variety: Now what can you do to simplify it for us?

Instalytics^TM a product of CFO Rapidfire, is YOUR answer! We worked diligently, creatively and aggressively, through our partnership with Intacct, which was named one of the Top 100 OnDemand Private Companies for the 3rd consecutive year and utilization of Tableau, named by Gartner, Inc. as one of the Biggest Challengers in the Business Intelligence Market, to develop an unparalleled tool which affords our clients the luxury of letting their data visualizations tell the story. All of this delivered anytime, anywhere.

Clarity comes from seeing "into" your data and understanding how it affects your business. Our goal is to empower the users to take the deluge of data and tell a picture that's worth a thousand words. All of this based on real results in real time. Your picture can be manipulated with relative ease to tell the story you actually need to hear at any particular point in time. Again, possibilities are basically endless. So, how many words is your picture worth?

Instalytics: Visualizing your Past, Present and Future

Admit it .. analyzing and reading financial statements can reduce just about anyone of us to tears. Enter Data Visualization and you have a game changer. CFO Rapidfire has developed a completely new way for financial statement users to access and interact with their data. This product is so unique that we decided to give it it's own name "Instalytics". Instalytics provides the end user with the ability to treat their financial statements as a data source: Trend, Compare, and Analyze on the fly!

Our customers are using this new product to instantly compare results for reporting periods such as the 4th week of each month for the last 12 months; or all Februarys from the last seven years. This functionality extends to all dimensions -- For Example: 1) Comparing P&L's for all stores with margins in excess of "x" or 2) Comparing all stores whose square footage exceeds a certain number, etc. The list is only limited by the dimensions selected and the user's creativity (so it's basically endless!).

Time to stop dreading the task of analyzing financial statements and visualize your past, present and future in a completely unparalleled way!

New SimCity? Count Me In!

There's a new mayor in town, and it comes in the form of the first new SimCity game in a decade! Yes, it's slated for a 2013 release (too far away!) and it will take the role of building a city to a level that you didn't think was really possible. It's no longer about making sure you have all of the needs of the people like police and libraries, but now there are POLITICS involved! Homeless people, organized crime, mass murder, EVERYTHING is encompassed in this new amazing game that will come out next year.

Check out articles here and here

Of course, if it's on the blog, then there must be some sort of relation to business intelligence. It's SimCity - the entire concept of the game is business intelligence! For example, if you create a booming metropolis with a population of over 100,000 people, there will obviously be a TON of data created through your sims - what they like to do in their spare time, where they work, and what their education and subsequent income is like. By taking all of this data and combining it into complex programs, you get the essence of business intelligence: a full blown city! Of course, depending on how your sims react to your management style, you could be a huge success or a total failure. Whether you become a modern-day Napoleon or a successful politician (I won't give specific examples because there will be resistance no matter who I say) there will be reactions from the citizens of your city.

For those people who are not really familar with business intelligence, SimCity is a great way to visualize it. A bunch of data brought together to create some sort of graphical or visual representation. In this case, the visualization is a city with towering skyscrapers or a really high unemployment rate. Kinda like Gotham City, but without the Batman effect.

Speaking of Gotham City, I'll address the upcoming DARK KNIGHT RISES soon. So pumped for that!

Predicting the NCAA Tournament

With the Final Four now set, it appears that I will finish my worst bracket in years, thanks to my awful basketball predicting ability. It is in a situation like this that I could have utilized BI to help me out with my bracket. The sites I have linked to use some sort of scientific method to determine outcomes for the NCAA tournament.

The first is from 2011, but uses a man-made formula to determine the outcome of the tournament. As you could see from his predictions, the writer did not have the greatest bracket, but he did manage to call some great upsets (Arizona over Duke being one of them) and had a much better bracket than I did. And I have won a lot of brackets in my day. Business Intelligence can help with this very kind of bracket - and can at least keep your bracket from finishing dead last like I did this year.

The next is a creation by a statistician who used a similar model to the above formula. The one big difference is that this model uses expert picks in his formula so that popular upset picks are weighted slightly more than they would if they were purely numerical. If you follow the link to the author's predictions, you will see that there are not actual picks, but rather percentages of victories. With the final four being the only games remaining, those games will be the only ones with percentages still on the page. Hopefully, after the tournament is over, all 67 game percentages will be listed on the site. I, for one, am interested to see what percentage Lehigh had to beat Duke in the round of 64.

Despite having two different methods of scientifically determining a champion in March Madness, obviously there is no way for ANYBODY to completely predict a perfect bracket. In fact, this season all brackets were busted (not perfect) by the second day of round 1. According to ESPN, nobody in the nation had the entire first round correct - and that statement was released halfway through the first round. For an entity such as the NCAA basketball tournament, it is incredibly difficult for anybody - man or machine - to correctly predict an entire tournament's outcome. But we can still use business intelligence to look somewhat smarter than a person who arbitrarely picks a champion because of a cool nickname or fun colors (South Dakota State Jackrabbits?)

 

Introducing Business Intelligence

Chances are, if you are reading this, you probably have at least a minimal interest in the concept of business intelligence (BI). And you probably have at least a minimal knowledge of business intelligence. So let me begin by explaining the website, www.cforapidfire.com.

CFO Rapidfire is a new, cloud based BI system that will not only gather data and information, but it will also create visualizations that make sense out of sheer numbers. What is truly great about CFO Rapidfire is the fact that it is cloud-based so you can utilize it to look at trends and relationships on any mobile device.

BI can be applied to pretty much anything in today's world. Whether it's predicting the outcome of the NCAA tournament or examining trends in presidential primary exit polls, it is a great tool for today's world.

We'll use this blog to examine many of the different ways BI and CFO Rapidfire can help different causes. Check out http://cforapidfire.com now for a look at the actual website.