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Using CXO Storyboards to Boost Collaboration and Storytelling

insightsoftware -
January 26, 2023

insightsoftware is a global provider of reporting, analytics, and performance management solutions, empowering organizations to unlock business data and transform the way finance and data teams operate.

23 01 Blog Usingcxostoryboards Website

Working in finance means you’re likely a wiz with numbers. You have an aptitude for quantitative information, as well as an affinity for drawing meaningful conclusions when presented a collection of numerical figures.

Even so, you probably understand and retain information better when it’s presented in story form. That is how most people operate, especially stakeholders outside the boundaries of the finance department.

By itself, a single report rarely tells the full story. To understand the big picture of enterprise performance, you’ll need multiple points of information, often provided as a series of reports.

Using storyboards’ narrative capabilities has the power to elevate your company’s level of financial intelligence. By using data directly from your source EPM system to build CXO storyboards, you’ll be able to drive better decisions and build organizational alignment around a clear and accurate interpretation of financial data.

Meaningful insights

Effective storytelling involves more than simply distributing some financial statements with a few accompanying footnotes. The story should be about conveying business performance powerfully and interactively and leveraging input from different operational departments.

CXO’s storyboards create a story that explains your company’s performance. They place individual reports within a broader context. This enhances the meaning and value to the people who rely on your reports for a better understanding of what is happening in your business.

Storyboards enable you to paint a vivid financial story using a collection of bookmarked reports. These reports will tell your financial story, whether monthly or annual review. So, you’ll be able to deliver a full story during meetings and with reporting packages.

To tell the specific story you need to tell, you can use the CXO Point of View feature. CXO’s storyboards allow you to set the year and period for which you want to display the reports. This saves you time as you will not have to recreate the same reporting deck for a new month.

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Time Well Spent

Old, complex processes for financial management hold you back from understanding your company’s story. Using programs like Excel can leave you collating numerous spreadsheets, creating and printing PDFs, before arduously emailing them individually to stakeholders. This eliminates your single source of truth.

Copying and pasting financial results into your presentation software is tedious and time-consuming and it also means you may be sharing inaccurate data. This method also means that whenever the numbers change, someone from your finance team must perform an audit to hopefully ensure all the reports are relaying the right data. This can lead to you presenting both embarrassing errors and misinformation to C-level executives.

With CXO, reports update automatically, pulling the most up-to-date information from your source EPM system. This means you’ll only have to do your work once as CXO storyboards use a single source of truth. You can trust that the data you are using is the right data. Instead of spending time sifting through data, you’ll be able to focus your energy on important insights.

If you want to get more automated with your storytelling, CXO scripted storyboards allow you to create fixed or dynamic storyboards, without bookmarking reports​. You’ll be able to create multiple storyboards that are similar but based on a different entity. So instead of painstakingly building the seemingly same storyboard over and over, scripted storyboards allow you to use scripting language to automate the process.

Relevant Reporting

Told well, your organization’s story will guide executives directly toward the key insights behind the data. Told wrong, executives become bogged down in a sea of numbers with no clear direction and little insight to offer.

To avoid your insights being muddled by a sea of data, storyboards are an easy way to create a collection of your key reports. For each storyboard, you can include the highly relevant reports, while excluding all others. In addition, you can organize your reports so that each one builds upon the others, creating a vivid picture for decision makers.

You’ll be able to easily bookmark these reports, dragging and dropping them into place. You’ll also be able to capture explanations for variances and to explain relevant issues beyond the numbers.

CXO storyboards are a great solution to elevate your company’s financial intelligence and drive better decision-making. If you are looking for a better way to tell your company’s financial narrative, contact insightsoftware to arrange a free demo.

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