Business owners face a constant barrage of decisions that help shape the trajectory of your business. From choosing which products to prioritize to crafting marketing strategies, hiring talent, and sourcing suppliers, the choices seem endless. Especially for small businesses.

Small businesses face distinct challenges, such as limited cash flow, difficulty in attracting skilled personnel, and standing out in a crowded marketplace. However, the journey toward growth needn't be riddled with obstacles and uncertainties.

In this article, we will explore how you can leverage reporting and analytics software to drive business growth and sidestep the typical growing pains.

We are surrounded by data - as individuals and as businesses - yet, we seldom know what to do with it. The importance of data comes not just from its collection but its analysis - from making sense of the insights beneath the numbers.

For many people - myself included - a spreadsheet filled with numbers doesn't make much sense. It doesn't paint a picture or tell a story that I'm able to unpack and act on. However, if you take that same data and transform it into a graph - different story.

The use of lines and colors paints a picture that is easier to interpret in less time, which is not surprising given that people tend to be visually oriented.

So, to bring the numbers down to earth where we can understand and use them, we may want to visualize them. There are a number of tools we have at our disposal to do this, from the much beloved Excel and Google Sheets, to more intuitive tools like Syft Analytics. The choice is yours, but, at the end of the day, making sense of the numbers is where true analysis starts.

Over time, the ways in which businesses have collected, examined, and responded to data have evolved a great deal. In addition, it's become apparent that the static financial reports, which so common a few years ago, no longer give businesses the necessary alacrity to respond to change.

This is a critical realization as, if there's anything that's been constant in the past few years - or even the past decade - it would be change.

To prepare your business for change, you need to be open to new ways of analyzing data.

The latest trends in the data analysis space involve cutting-edge technology and secure, highly reliable cloud services. These tools are primed to solve the problems many businesses face regarding the need to promptly respond to changing business environments and the influx of data.

Technology is here to help. It's not just big businesses that can benefit from it; your business can too. Let's unpack how.

There are numerous different software applications that you can leverage to save time and drive efficiency in your business, which will ultimately fuel business growth. From cloud accounting software such as Xero, Sage, and QuickBooks online to e-commerce software and point-of-sale software such as Shopify and Square.

For reporting and analytics, you can use Syft Analytics - Syft for short. Syft’s tools empower you with critical information to help you make data-driven decisions that empower you to operate more effectively and grow your business. Here are a few ways in which you can use Syft to assist with reporting and analytics:

Now, let's take a look at some specific features that you can use to report and analyze your business in real-time.

With Syft's Live View, it's easy to create and share impressive, real-time, collaborative reports with stakeholders to meet their requirements or garner additional investments. Live Views give you:

For instance, you could use the chat bar to add pre-recorded videos explaining key aspects of the report or collaborate on updates to the report or specific action items by tagging the relevant stakeholders.

Another opportunity for making better data-driven decisions that lead to growth can be found in Syft’s Benchmark section, where you can see how your business is faring compared to others in your industry. You can look at this both in terms of financial information and business activity, which is linked to operational information.

As Benjamin Franklin famously said, "If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail". Syft has some powerful tools to help you plan through:

The Cash Manager tool to helps you manage your short-term cash with predictive functionality that identifies potential deficits or surpluses early on. This assists you in ensuring that you make the right decisions regarding your cash.

Now that we've looked at some specific financial analysis tools, you may want to consider how you can work with more operational metrics in your business.

Success is based not just on financial KPIs, but also on the successful measurement and management of intangible resources that comprise your entity's intellectual capital. This is why it is beneficial to analyze non-financial data.

Syft’s Customer, Product, Supplier, and Connections sections give you insights into how to manage the operational and non-financial aspects of your business to be more efficient, better prepared for the future, and able to identify opportunities for growth.

The Customer section provides you with insights into how you are interacting with your clients or customers. Here, you can see key metrics about your customers, such as the highest customer spend or discounts given along with which customers are buying the most from you.

In addition, you can see new and active customers along with how much they owe you. You can unpack the details in both a graphical and tabular format (depending on your plan). From this, you can:

The Products section gives you insight into key product metrics, such as product gross profit, along with which of your products are fan favorites and which you need to promote more or perhaps drop. With the product graphs, you can gain a visual understanding of your products. Meanwhile, the product tables empower you to analyze your product sales metrics in detail.

Plus, Syft helps you to plan your inventory more effectively to ensure that you don’t run out of stock. The Inventory Management table gives you a high level overview of all your physical items in your business, including:

Using the quantity of sales, the average number of sales, and maximum sales in the month, Syft calculates when you are likely to run out of that item.

In this section, you gain insight into where you spend the most money and you can identify any supplier dependencies along with any potential discounts lost or interest incurred due to delayed payment.

Syft’s decision assistance doesn’t stop at operational decisions. Syft provides you with the ability to analyze and visualize non-financial information too. You can include non-financial data in graphs, reports, and forecasts.

With our new Connector capabilities, you can easily upload your non-financial data from Google Sheets or Excel to Syft. You could even consider integrating the source of your data from Google Sheets or Excel.

For example, you could download your Google Analytics data to Google Sheets and then make a streamlined connection between Google Analytics and Syft where you have the power to analyze and report on that information. One way in which you could do this is by automating the process with our Zapier connection.

As your business grows, it may branch out into different divisions, franchises, or companies. As a result, you will need to start managing and reporting on these different groups. This is when Syft’s Consolidation and Oversight tools will prove very useful.

We discussed the uses of the Oversight tool in our previous article, so now, it's time to explore the Consolidation tool on Syft. This tool is especially useful if you want to get an overall picture of all of your franchises or companies, eliminate inter-company transactions, or post other consolidation journals.

Consolidations can get complicated but Syft’s tool makes them simple, easy to use, and beneficial far beyond the requirement for consolidation accounts. Syft is able to consolidate any of the entities you have connected, even if they are on different accounting software or in different currencies.

Creating a group entity only takes a handful of clicks and you will then be able to view group statements and visualizations of financial information. Plus, you can drill down into the details of underlying entities in no time.

In addition, you can post journals in any of the entities to create accounts such as Goodwill or Non-Controlling Interest and use the eliminations tool to easily eliminate inter-company accounts or transactions.

You can then report on these groups either on their own or with information from underlying subsidiaries. You could even forecast or budget for this group!

Despite the overwhelming quantity of data available, it can be difficult to know where to focus your attention as you try to grow your business. This is why investing in reporting and analytics tools to help you make sense of the data can be so beneficial for you decision-making.

By visualizing your data, you are likely to be able to gain a better understanding of it and, with tools like Syft to help you analyze and report on your business as it grows, you will have the insights that you need to adapt to changes and perfect your processes. Want to find out more about Syft? Visit our website.