5 reasons every club finance manager needs BI
Jenna is the finance manager at a registered club in Western Sydney. She works with a great team and feels supported by the club’s executives, so she doesn’t mind doing the occasional overtime shift to manually compile monthly and quarterly finance reports.
Last week Jenna found out the board wants to cut operating costs by five percent in next year’s budget. It’s her job to determine where to make the savings.
While she could take a guess at where the club is losing money, she doesn’t have the data to support her intuition. She’d like to be able to compare financial data to previous reporting periods, identify underperforming revenue sources and plan for future expenditure with confidence, but the club’s finance and reporting systems make this difficult.
For example, she can’t extract data from data sources without IT support. Reports are often out of date before they reach her desk, and she’s not sure that the spreadsheets her team produces are accurate.
Jenna loves her club, but she wishes it were easier to access and interpret financial information. Her club isn’t interested in replacing its expensive finance system, so she’s started searching for alternative solutions.
A club-specific business intelligence (BI) platform is a great alternative to upgrading existing IT infrastructure. Here are five ways BI can solve Jenna’s biggest headaches, while also streamlining operations for colleagues in other business units.
- Gain control of club finances
Without the right insights, it’s easy to feel like your club’s finances are left to chance. Finance managers like Jenna are forced to make big decisions – like how to reduce an operating budget by five percent – by gut feel, rather than data.
With a BI solution, Jenna could instantly view financial data from multiple systems in a single dashboard. She could see everything happening in the club in real-time, from gaming revenue to Mothers’ Day lunch sales. This would make it easier to analyse and pinpoint business activity drivers, maximise strong revenue sources and identify areas that are underperforming.
- Plan ahead by analysing past performance
BI gives club finance managers the historical data they need to both learn from previous mistakes and capitalise on emerging opportunities. Because BI platforms collect huge amounts of data every day, their insights become increasingly valuable over time. With more data to draw on, Jenna could make smarter financial decisions based on past performance, not guesswork.
- Say goodbye to inaccurate spreadsheets
Jenna doesn’t mind using spreadsheets in some instances, but she’d rather not rely on them to manage financial reports. There are no rules or business logic to protect data from errors in an Excel spreadsheet, so she worries about data integrity every time a member of her team generates a new report.
Fortunately for Jenna, a good BI tool can automatically generate reports in any format. This reduces the risk of human error and ensures data accuracy.
- Generate custom reports without IT support
Jenna spends more time than she’d like waiting for IT to create reports, and she’s not the only club finance manager with this problem. With a BI solution, Jenna could instantly view data in easy-to-interpret graphs and visualisations, or generate her own custom report in minutes.
- Allocate resources more effectively
If there’s one expense that puts a club in the red fast, it’s wages. While Jenna is responsible for allocating a monthly wage budget, she finds most business units don’t stick to their limits. Their managers worry about having too few staff to meet demand. This means that at the end of each month Jenna must try and make savings elsewhere to account for extra wage costs.
A BI solution could eliminate Jenna’s wage budget blowouts by:
- Identifying peak periods
- Automatically scheduling enough staff to meet demand
- Matching wage costs with revenue.
Section managers would be confident they have enough staff, and Jenna would know that the wage budget was adequate.
To find out more about business intelligence and clubs, call Professional Advantage on 1800 126 499.
You can read more about Professional Advantage and ClubIntel here.
