It’s no secret that finance leaders often lack visibility into business performance beyond what falls within their data silo and spend many hours tracking down and consolidating the data they need to create financial reports. Creating plans and forecasts are also difficult if 95% of the team’s time is spent collecting data, and only 5% is spent doing the more important task of analyzing it. BI tools can alleviate reporting, budgeting and planning frustrations by consolidating data from different sources, increasing visibility into business data across the organization and equipping finance leaders with tools to streamline the workflow of the reporting, planning and forecasting processes. Furthermore, a BI tool allows finance leaders to up the ante on analysis capabilities by enabling them to create what-if (predictive) scenarios that help them determine the best course of action for the future. They can also access complex visualizations like Pareto charts to determine their (historically) most-to-least profitable customers and operational visualizations that enable them to monitor accounts receivables data. BI relieves the time-consuming manual tasks the finance team often encounters, giving them more time for analysis and strategic planning.