Empower Finance Departments with Embedded Analytics
Introduction
Many businesses had to adjust during the Covid-19 pandemic to achieve their goals. To meet the new challenges, finance departments had to change their approach to budgeting, reporting, expenditure, and investment. With Bold BI, those companies can better handle their data, helping them retain a competitive edge over other companies. In this blog post, I will explain how embedded analytics can help upgrade finance departments.
What Is Embedded Analytics?
Embedded analytics includes integrating analytical solutions and data visualization capabilities into a software application’s user interface to improve data comprehension and usability. Bold BI helps you easily embed an analytics solution into your everyday work application using a JavaScript SDK and a server application. It also enables you to reduce dependency on IT teams, and it delivers all the insight you need to improve organizational and workforce outcomes.
Effect of Embedded Analytics on Finance departments
Embedded analytics helps companies realize how they’re performing, helping them identify strengths and weaknesses. Through this analysis, new ways of approaching a company’s finances can be perceived, enabling balance sheets to be easily reconciled.
Embedded analytics influences finance departments in the following ways:
- Analyzing financial risk and devising strategies.
- Enhancing financial administration.
- Making workflow management efficient.
- Making cash flow management efficient.
Analyzing financial risk and devising strategies
Embedded analytics has reduced the financial risk in most companies. Tracking key metrics such as AR turnover, AP turnover, equity ratio, debt equity, and current ratio helps managers and workers identify new strategies, like analyzing risks and planning a budget. With the new trends, they balance their finances on liabilities and assets to attain a financial goal and maintain the company’s everyday operations.
Enhanced financial administration
Embedded analytics helps you analyze the balance sheet of a company and provides insight for key decision makers by tracking metrics such as working capital, liquidity ratio, days sales outstanding, and more. Monitoring these metrics helps managers know about the financial health of the company and prepare and implement new plans to expand their business, which help in booking more revenue and managing it efficiently.
Efficient workflow management
Embedded analytics can improve the workflow of financial operations. Tracking metrics such as days sales of inventory, days sales outstanding, total accounts payable, total accounts receivable, and more, a manager can quickly check and categorize the performance of the sales team. This helps set a target that motivates salespeople, making them more focused on their work.
The finance department ensures that financial data is being monitored, properly budgeted, planned, and reported, which leads to the department achieving its expectations and improving its workflow. This motivates team members to perform better and complete their work on time, which reduces the time to approach the market, potentially increasing sales.
Efficient cash flow management
Embedded analytics enables a company to determine its financial health status. The status can be visualized by using metrics such as cash balance, cash flow, income, expenses, and more. By monitoring trends closely, a manager can find solutions and instruct employees to implement new operations, which helps in increasing income and reducing expenses, promoting profitability, and making the company have operational growth.
How to embed analytics tools into financial apps
Let’s see how analytics can be embedded into your finance web applications. Bold BI helps you embed your dashboards in 18 web platforms, including React with ASP.NET Core, React with Go, WinForms, Node.js, VueJS with Go, and VueJS with Core. In this blog, I am going to explain how to embed dashboards in ASP.NET MVC applications. Consider a scenario in which your finance department has a website like the one shown in the following image.
You can embed dashboards easily using Bold BI and avoid building an analytics or BI solution yourself. Follow these steps to embed your dashboard successfully.
Prerequisites
Download and install the Bold BI server on your local machine and create an enterprise-grade dashboard. You can find the installation and deployment instructions in the “ Installation and Deployment” documentation.
Step 1: Creating an ASP.NET MVC application
To successfully embed a dashboard in your application, first you need to create an ASP.NET MVC application. Open Microsoft Visual Studio and click New Project. Then choose ASP.NET MVC Web Application, enter the project name, and click OK.
Step 2: Configure embed properties
After the ASP.NET MVC web application is created, you need to create a Model class called EmbedProperties under Models and provide the dashboard RootURL, SiteIdentifier, Environment, UserEmail, and EmbedSecret.
RootUrl : Bold BI dashboard server URL. Example: http://localhost:58094/bi.SiteIdentifier : For Bold BI, it should follow the format `site/site1`. For Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, it should be an empty string.Environment : Your Bold BI application environment. If using Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, you should use `cloud`. If using Bold BI, you should use `enterprise`.UserEmail : Bold BI server will use an email to authorize the authorization server.
Step 3: Generate embed secret
You have to set EmbedSecret for authentication. You can get the embed secret from the Bold BI server. Then, navigate to the Settings icon in the left navigation bar and click the Embed tab.
Click Enable embed authentication and then click the Generate Secret button to generate the embed secret. On clicking the button, a secret key will be generated, and you can paste it into the application. To learn how to do this in more detail, you can refer to this Bol BI’s documentation.
Note: Save the secret key, as it cannot be retrieved again. If you do not save it, you will have to generate a new one using the Reset Secret option.
Step 4: Create authorization server
You need to implement an authorization server in the ASP.NET MVC application to get authentication before embedding the dashboard from the Bold BI server. You can also configure the single sign-on (SSO)-based authorization server, which is an authentication endpoint that enables users to securely authenticate multiple applications using unique embed secrets. This prevents the need for the user to log into different applications separately.
Step 5: Create a Bold BI instance
Finally, create a Bold BI instance to load the dashboard using a JavaScript file. Reference required script files and CSS files in the HTML pages.
Step 6: Run the application to embed the dashboard
After successfully creating the ASP.NET MVC application, you need to run it. It will be launched successfully with the dashboard details. Finally, you can see that the dashboard created in the Bold BI server is embedded in your web application.
To learn more about embedding dashboards into your applications, please refer to the blog “ Integrating Dashboards into Applications with the Embed SDK.” You can also download the sample code mentioned in all these steps from our documentation. Let’s see the Bold BI dashboard examples in detail.
Bold BI finance solution dashboard examples
Financial management dashboard
Embedding a financial management dashboard allows managers to identify the most suitable key metrics of a company’s finances. This helps managers identify trend shifts in the market and enables them to come up with different business ideas by comparing yearly financial performance.
Key metrics and KPIs:
Current Ratio: Measures the ability to pay all a company’s financial obligations within a year.
Days Sales Inventory (DSI): Measures the average number of days required for a business to convert its inventory into sales.
Days Sales Outstanding (DSO): Measures the number of days a company takes to collect payment after sales have been made.
Days Payable Outstanding (DPO): This is the average number of days a company needs to pay its bills.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard demo, refer to the Financial Management Dashboard example.
Online accounting dashboard
Embedding this online accounting dashboard has helped business owners, bookkeepers, and accountants keep track of what is happening in their businesses. Using metrics such as bank balance, amounts receivable, and amounts payable enables managers and workers to come up with new ideas for approaching their businesses.
Key metrics and KPIs:
Bank balance: Shows the net amount available to you after all deposits and credits have been balanced with any charges or debits.
Amounts Receivable: Shows the total amount of money customers owe the company.
Overdue Invoices: Shows the count of invoices that have crossed their due date.
Overdue Amount: Shows the amount that has crossed the due date.
Income: Shows the income earned during the current month.
Expenses: Shows the money spent on expenses for the current month.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to the Online Accounting Dashboard demo.
Profit and loss dashboard
Embedding this profit and loss dashboard provides a detailed view of your business finances to help you analyze your revenue and expenses, customer growth, and payment status. Using metrics such as revenue, expenses, income, customer growth, and payment status promotes profitability, making the company operational.
Key metrics and KPIs:
Revenue: Shows the amount of money a company receives from selling goods and providing services to its customers.
Customer growth: Shows growth in the number of customers.
Expenses: Shows the cost of operations that a company incurs to generate revenue.
Payment status: This is the status of payments owed to the company.
Profit margin: This is the difference between the cost of making something and the price at which it is sold.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard demo, refer to the Profit and Loss Dashboard Example.
Budget vs. actual dashboard
Embedding this budget vs. actual dashboard provides an overview of actual income and budgeted income and expenses for a particular period. This makes a company balance its revenue and expenditures, thus achieving its goals.
Key metrics and KPIs:
Income budget (%): Shows the actual income as a percentage of the budgeted income.
Expense budget (%): Shows the actual expense as a percentage of the budgeted expense.
Expense: Shows the cost of operations that a company incurs to generate revenue.
Income: Shows the total amount earned in business over a period of time.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to the Budget vs. Actual Dashboard demo.
Balance sheet dashboard
Embedding this balance sheet dashboard shows the financial state of a company account through financial metrics. This helps track financial account performance for a particular period of the year.
Key metrics and KPIs:
Working capital: Shows the working capital of the company. This can be calculated by current assets minus current liabilities.
Liquidity ratio: Shows the comparison of current liabilities to current liquid assets.
Debt-to-asset ratio: Shows the ratio of total debts to total assets.
Debt-to-equity ratio: Shows the ratio of total liabilities to total equity.
Inventory to sales: Shows the ratio of the store’s inventory amount to the revenue obtained.
Inventory turnover: The ratio of the cost of goods sold to the average value of inventory within the same period.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard demo, refer to the Balance Sheet Dashboard example.
Conclusion
Bold BI helps you seamlessly integrate dashboards in applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails, and more. It saves you time and prevents you from doing redundant work. To learn more, explore Bold BI’s list of features. To learn about embedding dashboards into your application, refer to the blog “ Integrating Dashboards into Applications with the Embed SDK” and our documentation.
I hope you now have a better understanding of Bold BI and how it can help the finance departments of businesses to be more successful. You can create a dashboard any way you like with Bold BI’s 35+ widgets and 130+ supported data sources.
Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free 15-day trial and create interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support questions.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on February 9, 2022.
