Increase Your Value Using Financial Analysis Software
To make the financial advisor part of your job easier, we suggest you use financial analysis software. It gives you the ability to benchmark your client’s business performance against industry standards. Plus, it allows you to make timely, data-driven decisions. Financial analysis software adds value to you as an advisor.
Maybe you’re already using a financial analysis tool, such as Excel. But hear us out – replace Excel with a Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting software! If you graduate to a BP&F software, you can turn data into business insight. Excel also poses challenges in these areas:
- Security
- Control
- Consolidation
- Workflow
- Automation
In contrast, here are the benefits of using a dedicated BP&F tool over Excel:
- Automates your annual budgeting process.
- Consolidates and centralizes a business’s financial information.
- Plans a company’s financial direction for the next three to five years.
- Documents how that plan follows through month-to-month and specifies expenditures.
- Forecasts finances using past company data to predict financial outcomes for the future.
- Promotes consistency across reports.
And, nowadays, financial analysis is easy – if you use the right software. Just two years ago though, the reach of technology to financial advisors was severely limited. There were only a handful of players. Some of them were large platforms that had to be extensively adapted and customized to be relevant for financial advisors.
But, eventually, software companies took advantage of this low-hanging business fruit. Today, there are many financial analysis software companies on the market.
We sorted through them and picked out the best ones to recommend for you. We also highlighted advantages and disadvantages of each tool.
The Best Financial Analysis Software On the Market
- BodeTree
If you’re looking for a simple financial analysis tool, BodeTree is the one of the most easy to use out there. Features include:
- Forecasting
- Goal building
- Valuation
- Examine financial statements and a company’s financial health
- Peer comparisons
- Strategy building.
While BodeTree claims its suite will help you “dive deeper into your business financials,” their financial analysis tools are limited.
For example, their Business Health tool doesn’t offer the ability to model “what if” scenarios. So, you can’t see how, for instance, adding revenue could impact a company.
The tool does identify strengths, warnings, and weaknesses. But, how do you know how to improve with just these indicators? You need a more dedicated tool that gives you proven action items to turn that weakness into a strength and help the business grow!
- IBISWorld
IBISWorld is different from BodeTree in that it doesn’t have a fully dedicated financial analysis suite of tools. IBISWorld provides industry research reports that are a really powerful business tool. The reports provide strategic insight and analysis on over 700 U.S. industries.
IBISWorld’s reports are objective, easy to understand, and pretty extensive. Plus, their reports are up-to-date on every U.S. industry. These features will help you make better business decisions – and faster.
Plus, you can find industry data and analysis on niche and emerging industries in IBISWorld’s Specialized Industry Report Collections. If you’ve ever tried finding this type of data, you know that it can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. And, IBISWorld is currently adding hundreds more industry research titles into new collections.
- iCFO
If you combined IBISWorld and BodeTree’s features, you would get iCFO – only better.
iCFO has a dynamic range of financial analysis tools. Plus, it gives you the ability to gain insight into your industry competitor or peer group’s financials.Whether you’re a business coach, advisor or consultant, we have the tools and insights you need.
We already work with nearly 275 professional advisors. We help them empower their clients to make better business decisions. iCFO provides these benefits for professional advisors:
Get a company’s financial health snapshots in minutes
Enter your client’s data then receive a concise profile of your client’s fiscal state. This includes business ratios focusing on liquidity, profitability, asset efficiency, and growth. All it takes is just five minutes!
Set-up is a breeze. What would take you hours using Excel, only takes you five-minutes with iCFO. There’s a ton of advantages of using a Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting software over using Excel. Learn about them here in a previous blog post.
Have confidence in reliable data
Make sound business recommendations based on financial data that’s passed 200 filters. And, our data has been refined using time-tested statistical logarithms.
Access the answers you need
We offer a wide range of business analytics, key performance indicators, reports, and practical recommendations. We also include industry peer benchmarking. With these tools, you can review ROI, sales per employee, profit margins and more to identify areas of concern and opportunity.
You can even examine “what if” scenarios and P&L impact of reducing costs or adding revenue. Advisors who use iCFO tell us they love having the ability to run a cash flow analysis.
“For coaches to be able to run a cash flow analysis, that’s a huge value to the client,” says John Laslavic, experienced business coach at ThistleSea Business Development in Pittsburgh, Pa.
Our nine tools include:
Business Performance Scorecard – review a snapshot of your client’s company’s financial state. Examine its liquidity, profitability, asset efficiency, and growth. Then, compare it to your client’s industry peers.
“iCFO fits into my discovery process,” says Laslavic. “The Business Performance Scorecard gives me a quick layout of what the organization looks like, which I need to evaluate the business.”
Business Risk – evaluate your client’s financial health and its ability to weather typical market fluctuations. Accurately determine its viability.
Liquidity – this is where you can analyze your liquidity position using an innovative proprietary measure. Determine working capital needs and model steps to improve cash sufficiency with “what-if” scenarios.
Profitability – determine a company’s profitability performance, model “what-if” scenarios designed to help improve its performance, and view placement amongst its industry peers.
Industry Metrics – you’ll have the ability to analyze annual financials, median statistics, ratios and more of your industry competitors or peer groups.
Loan Risk – analyze your client’s financial viability and its ability to repay new debt obligations. This will allow you to make quick and effective loan decisions.
Financial Statement Spreading – compare multiple years of financials right next to each other. Benchmark against industry peers for each itemized Income Statement and Balance Sheet account with Financial Ratios.
Business Valuation – examine your client’s business’s market value using popular valuation techniques. Then, compare it to industry peers.
Growth Potential – evaluate a company’s Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR). Model “what-if” scenarios designed to improve your client’s SGR and its placement amongst industry peers.
Another advantage to using financial analysis software is that most software out there provides easily downloadable PDF reports that reflect all of your online reports. iCFO even allows you to personalize report output with your business logo and information.
Hopefully we’ve convinced you to stop using Excel and finally graduate to a dedicated financial analysis software tool. With financial analysis software, enjoy customized client reporting, deliver more value to your clients each month, quickly evaluate their financial numbers, continually discover opportunities for improvement, and have the know-how to implement action steps.
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