Revenue Analytics Blog
How Accountants Can Use Analytics to Help Their Business Clients Recover from the Covid19 Crisis
I have said often on this blog that accountants, not Data Scientists, will be responsible for bringing advanced analytics to small and medium size businesses. Though we wish otherwise, this Covid19 crisis might be the catalyst that accelerates that process. For millions of businesses around the world, their accountant is the main source of performance information. In the coming months, those same accountants can play a crucial role in helping their business clients navigate the uncertainty of the post-Covid19 Crisis Read more
The 7 Data Science Skills That Will Change the Accounting Career
There was a time, not too long ago, when Finance and Accounting had complete control over most of the decision making data in any business. I caught the tail end of that generation. At my first job as Financial Analyst for a licensing division of the Walt Disney Company, the finance department had control over all data, including the G/L, contract systems, customer and vendor database, budget and forecast files, and even the IT function. We owned the keys to Read more
The Words You Use Reveal If You Are Data-Driven
The topic of analytics is intimidating and even scary for many people, not because it involves technical discussions about databases, mathematics, or machine learning, but because the aim of analytics is to stop impostors dead in their tracks. By definition, you cannot be an analytics driven organization and at the same time have managers, at any level, spewing myths, assumptions, and outright fallacies about the way their company works, the market moves, or the customer thinks. This is the scariest Read more
Dream-Driven vs Data-Driven Budgeting
I think it is safe to say that many companies reverse engineer their budgets. That is, they decide on a final profit number or percentage and then go about building all the P&Ls to support that final number. From Wall Street to Main Street (sorry for the cliche), business managers tend to build budgets that reflect the expectations of owners and shareholders. Owners like this approach because it allows them to set a hurdle and have their minions scurry around Read more