By Paul Ursich, Partner, Wiss CFO Advisory

At Wiss, we’re thrilled to be creating a new Business Analytics and Intelligence Practice that will deliver impactful analytics services to our clients.

These days middle-market companies are investing the most in business analytics compared to other technology-enabled capabilities. They are looking to use analytical tools to help with budgeting, planning, and forecasting; performance management; and financial reporting automation and consolidation.

To help companies with those goals, our new practice will focus on three key areas:

• Financial close process automation and reporting to help middle market companies reduce time and costs spent preparing financial information for reporting and analysis.
• Client training and upskilling to help middle market businesses develop finance talent who can meet demands of working with data, with a training focus on key skills, practical use cases, and widely used tools.
• Performance management to help companies ensure profitability through effective budgeting and forecasting analytics, scaling across specific client groups, and building topic-specific dashboards to enable leadership in an industry or niche.

Why we are launching this practice area?

Middle market companies have a range of data challenges, including messy and incomplete data, dispersed and disconnected data stored in many different systems, inefficient financial processes to handle data, and lack of training to efficiently collect and transform data as well as extract meaningful insights.

Those challenges lead staff members to waste a lot of time in producing clean and consolidated information, which results in slow and poor-quality decision-making, lost revenue opportunities, higher operational costs, and inaccurate reporting and forecasts.

Surveys show that around half of middle-market companies find their current data analysis insufficient, struggle with data being stored in too many places creating silos, and suffer from poor data quality. A significant number also find it takes too long to access their data.

Facing these problems, middle-market companies tend to spend more time preparing data for analysis instead of using business analytics to add value to their businesses.

Wiss’ new top-tier analytics practice will help clients better organize and consolidate their data, develop and mentor analytical talent to allow for meaningful analysis, and ensure the effectiveness and profitability of these efforts.