How Financial Analysts Can Benefit from Embedded Dashboards
Introduction
Many financial managers in today’s world are experiencing difficulties delivering clear, reliable, and insightful financial reports. This comes as a result of financial managers lacking proper financial performance information or control over daily financial reports. Using a financial performance dashboard in your application helps solve these problems by enabling you to regularly collect and identify all the key financial metrics needed to monitor the financial health of your business.
Embedded analytics collects data from internal and external sources, performs analysis, and tracks key performance indicators (KPIs). It also provides you with an overview of your business’ liquidity and current cash flow, providing insight into how you can improve financial performance.
In this blog post, I am going to review how embedded analytics helps financial analysts and managers achieve their business goals. I’ll discuss following topics:
- What is embedded analytics?
- Benefits of embedded analytics in a financial performance dashboard
- Bold BI’s financial performance dashboard example
- How to embed analytical tools into financial apps
What is embedded analytics?
Embedded analytics is the integration of 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 applications using a JavaScript SDK and server application. In a finance department, embedded analytics with Bold BI helps leaders make accurate predictions about future revenue performance from inventory sales.
Benefits of embedded analytics in a financial performance dashboard
Embedding a financial performance dashboard provides users with an understanding of how they can increase income in their businesses with the help of useful metrics and KPIs. Understanding areas in need of financial change, support, and improvement benefits decision-makers by helping them apply better ways to increase profits at a lower cost. In this blog, we shall see the importance of embedding a financial performance dashboard to:
- Make better decisions
- Increase profitability
- Save time and resources
Make better decisions
An organization that makes decisions properly is likely to escape risks, as it always plans ahead. In a financial department, making the right decisions helps managers avoid financial paralysis and increases financial health by enabling them to eliminate all costly activities that are less beneficial to the organization.
With embedded analytics, accountants can monitor metrics — such as total accounts payable, total accounts receivable, debit equity, and more — to determine the financial health of a business. Also, they can monitor how different departments identify areas highly exposed to financial risk. With this information, decision-makers will be able to identify and eliminate all unnecessary activities in the company and advise managers of different departments to invest only in activities that benefit the company.
Increase profitability
The profitability of a business is measured by its liabilities and assets. When assets are higher than liabilities, we say it is profitable. A profitable business is advantaged since it can easily pay its employees on time, increase the salary of its employees, and pay its debts on time. Embedded analytics helps financial leaders track metrics — such as profit and loss summary, days sales inventory, total accounts receivable, and payable aging — to determine current assets and liabilities.
These gives them insight into the profitability level of a business, allowing them to easily understand whether they are on track or not. Using this knowledge, managers can identify some of the improvements the company needs to make to be able to achieve its goals. This helps them make necessary adjustments to increase profit and reduce loss as they meet their targets.
Save time and resources
Embedded analytics helps a financial management team save time by using the information at their fingertips more effectively. It enables the management team to analyze data at a glance by clicking on a single metric that gives them the ability to drill down for more details. Closer monitoring of these metrics enables them to have all the information about their financial performance at hand, allowing them to identify all the areas that need improvement and to address them quickly. This allows them to save on the time they spend thoroughly searching to identify areas that need improvement and resources that could have been used to fix the issues.
Bold BI’s financial performance dashboard example
The Financial Management Dashboard example illustrates how to track important metrics of a company’s finances over a particular period of the year.
Key Metrics and KPIs
- Total accounts receivable
- Total accounts payable
- Equity ratio
- Debit equity
- Current ratio
- Days sales inventory (DSI)
- Days sales outstanding (DSO)
- Days payable outstanding (DPO)
- Total accounts receivable and payable aging
- Net working capital vs gross working capital
- Profit and loss summary
Total accounts receivable
This card widget shows the total amount of a company’s goods that have not yet been paid for by its clients. It allows leaders to know the total debt each client owes.
Total accounts payable
This card widget shows the amount of money your company owes its creditors for the goods or services purchased and supplied to it that have not yet been paid. It allows you to know the total amount of liabilities in your business.
Equity ratio
This card widget indicates the ratio between the total assets financed by the company and its creditors. It allows you to determine how your business is performing financially to know whether you are making profits or not.
Debit equity
This card widget shows a comparison between the company’s total liabilities to its shareholder equity. It can be used to evaluate how much leverage a company is using.
Current ratio
This radial gauge shows the measure of a company’s ability to pay all its obligations within a year.
Days sales inventory (DSI)
This radial gauge shows the measurement of the average number of days required for a business to convert its inventory to sales.
Days sales outstanding (DSO)
This radial gauge shows the measure of the average number of days that the company takes to collect payments after sales have been made.
Days payable outstanding (DPO)
This radial gauge shows the average time in days that a company takes to pay its bills and invoices to its trade creditors, which includes suppliers, vendors, and other companies.
Total accounts receivable and payable aging
This column chart shows a comparison between total accounts receivable and accounts payable by the number of days due (due dates). This gives managers knowledge about current assets and liabilities.
Net Working Capital vs Gross Working Capital
This line chart shows how much money is available to fund assets and other obligations and the total current assets of the company. With this metric, leaders can easily track net working capital to determine the aggregate amount of all current assets and liabilities. They can also monitor their gross working capital to know their assets or the company’s total financial resources.
Profit and loss summary
This combo chart shows the profit-and-loss summary on a monthly basis and also tracks total sales, cost of goods sold (COGS), and operating expenses (OE) shown in purple, blue, and green, respectively. With this metric, leaders can monitor the yellow to determine the months with constant profit-loss results and months with increased profit-loss results.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard demo, refer to the Financial Management Dashboard example.
How to embed analytical tools into financial apps
Let’s see how analytics can be embedded into finance web applications. Bold BI can embed your dashboards in apps for more than 18 web platforms, including React with ASP.NET Core, React with Go, WinForms, Node.js, Vue with Go, and Vue with Core. In the rest of this blog, I am going to explain how to embed dashboards into your Angular 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 in your local machine and create a dashboard. You can find the installation and deployment steps in this documentation.
Step 1: Create an Angular application.
First, you need to create an Angular application. Create a new Angular project in Visual Studio Code and add the necessary ts files to the project, as shown in the following image.
For more guidance, refer to the sample code in the Bold BI documentation.
In this demonstration, the Angular application acts as the client, and an ASP.NET Core application acts as the server. You need to add several properties in the app.component.ts file, as shown in the following table and screenshot.
RootUrl : Bold BI dashboard server URL. For example: http://localhost:5000/biSiteIdentifier : For Bold BI, it should be something like “site/site1”. For the Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, it should be an empty string.Environment : Your Bold BI application environment. If using the Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, you should use “cloud.” If using Bold BI, you should use “enterprise.”User Email : The Bold BI server will use an email address to authorize the authorization server.
Step 2: Create a Bold BI instance.
You need to create a Bold BI instance to communicate between the server-side (any web application) and the client-side (Angular application), which allows you to embed a Bold BI dashboard in the Angular application.
Step 3: Create an authorization server to authenticate the Bold BI server.
Every application that embeds a Bold BI dashboard or widget must be authorized with the Bold BI server. This authentication step requires sending confidential information to the Bold BI server, such as users’ email addresses, group data, and embed signatures. So, in your server application, implement this authentication flow and provide the URL for connecting to your server in the Bold BI embedded instance.
Step 4: Run the Angular application to view the embedded dashboard.
In the Angular application, enter the authorization URL and dashboard URL that were defined in the ASP.NET Core application. Finally, you can see that the dashboard created in the Bold BI server is embedded in your web application.
By following the previous steps, you can successfully embed your dashboard into your Angular application.
To learn more about embedding dashboards into your Angular applications, refer to this blog. You can also download the sample code used in the previous steps from our documentation.
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 finance departments 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 August 5, 2022.
