The challenge with traditional financial analysis

Financial analysis can be a complicated, time-consuming endeavor. Financial data must be gathered, processed, then reviewed from multiple angles to determine the best path forward. Collection and analysis of data can be very time-consuming if done manually. The time it takes to collect and analyze data may limit the organization’s ability to conduct an in-depth analysis of every topic they’d like. It could also restrict their ability to drill down into data and discover undetected or unexpected trends or correlations.

The core challenge organizations typically face with financial analysis is that they often have financial data in silos, and data access must be given manually. Analysts often store financial data on local machines, or data is contained wholly within Excel spreadsheets, even when stored in the cloud.

Neal’s approach to improving financial analysis

Financial analysts must move away from manually compiling financial data in siloed Excel spreadsheets to solve the challenge outlined above. Instead, they need to modernize data by leveraging a cloud database to store and process data.

Visualizing the data

Modernizing financial data by bringing it into a cloud environment where it can be harmonized and serve as a single source of truth helps alleviate data access problems but doesn’t immediately result in faster and deeper financial analysis capabilities. For the organizations to make sense of the data and expedite financial analysis, they require BI reporting tools designed to visualize the data.

Most of these tools have their limits, however. BI dashboards take time to build and update. They may remain inflexible for analysts to drill down into data or view different data points than those currently visualized on a dashboard. New data points and visualization can be added, but dashboard updates often rely on the bandwidth and availability of BI engineers.

Crux Intelligence

Crux Intelligence resolves this challenge by allowing users to easily create new data visualizations and build or enhance dashboards through a user-friendly interface. Crux enables users to type in natural language questions, then automatically generate visualizations based on the question. From there, users can choose to save the visualization to a dashboard or enter a different question. Quickly saving ad hoc visualizations allows analysts to generate on-demand dashboards based on a single source of truth, significantly enhancing and accelerating analysis capabilities.

Learn more about Crux in the video below:

Our approach

To help organizations modernize their financial analysis, Neal Analytics works with FP&A teams to understand their current challenges and ideal end state, then builds a modernization roadmap. By creating the roadmap, Neal Analytics can help ensure that all relevant data sources and data points are ingested into a cloud database that meets any potential regulatory compliance requirements. Neal Analytics then works with engineers from Fractal to layer on the Crux Intelligence tool to enable AI-driven BI.

New capabilities

The beauty of leveraging Crux Intelligence on top of a Neal architected financial database extends well beyond the typical benefits of leveraging BI tools to visualize financial data. While these tools may be able to provide similar benefits around expediting the analysis of financial data compared to traditional analysis methods, they lack the flexibility provided by Crux Intelligence.

Crux Intelligence allows analysts to quickly drill down on financial data and examine data from multiple angles by simply typing questions into a prompt. Crux then automatically creates data visualizations to help the analyst answer the question they entered. Since Neal leverages best practices for modernizing financial databases, analysts and organizations can trust the data shown in these visualizations since they all pull from the same single source of truth. All of these capabilities combine to allow analysts to conduct quicker, more accurate analysis of financial data and dig deeper and discover previously undetected opportunities, correlations, or trends that could inform better business decision-making.

Getting started

It is easy to get started working with Neal Analytics. Our flexible engagement model allows organizations to get started quickly with the engagement model that works best for them.

If you would like to modernize your FP&A capabilities or explore other use cases for Crux Intelligence, contact us today to learn more, or request a demo from the Crux team at Fractal.