Visualizing Financial Data with Astrato

Visualization is the key to harnessing the full potential of financial data. In this blog, we explore the benefits of visualizing financial data and how Astrato, a Cloud-native Business Intelligence (BI) platform, facilitates this practice. From real-time analytics to automated precision, and the role of AI-driven insights, we’ll delve into Astrato’s transformative impact on financial data visualization.

Why Visualize Financial Data?

Put simply, visualizing financial data makes complex information easier to understand. This means faster time to insights and more accessibility for business users. The brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text, so visualized data is understood more intuitively than written insights.

Trends and patterns lost in raw data become obvious when presented in charts and graphs. Users can see big picture metrics in the form of KPIs as well as being able to drill down and obtain more granular insights; both are important for understanding financial data.

Single-source of Truth

Fractions of a second matter in finance. So much so we lay transatlantic cables to cut five milliseconds off communication times. Cloud-native BI means real-time data analytics, providing the most accurate, up to date insights possible. The benefit of cloud-native BI is not only the quality of the insights but the potential for collaboration.

Astrato runs natively in the chosen data connection, analyzing big data without creating data silos or data marts. Business users can combine multiple data sources that all team members work from, ensuring accurate financial insights and a single-source of truth.

Given the multitude of factors pertinent to finance, this Cloud-native analysis is essential for quality financial reporting. A finance team can then share the data quickly and securely, without revealing more data than necessary when sharing sensitive information with external stakeholders.

Accuracy Through Automation

The legacy BI workflow is clumsy and inefficient. Someone wants insight into a specific topic: they talk to a BI developer, who then must talk to a data engineer, who must create a data mart that the developer can use to deliver the insight via a data visualization tool.

Any edit to the original query means that this chain of communication is repeated. This process is both error-prone, and slow. Astrato solves this with Actions. Actions are functions that are driven by interactions and time, including filters, writeback, and automations.

These functions enable the utilization of end-to-end data products, leading to more precise, analytics-driven financial data visualization and customized outputs based on user interaction.

Choosing the Right Data Visualization

Data type, the purpose of the visualization, and the intended audience are all significant factors in selecting an appropriate data visualization. Given these considerations, and the extensive variety of charts and graphs available, visualizing financial data correctly can be difficult.

Astrato AI Insights solves this issue. The feature integrates OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, which powers ChatGPT, to send customized prompts to the AI. The charts, graphs, and textual analysis generated by ChatGPT is then returned to the user all through the Astrato platform.

Business users can then reveal trends, detect anomalies, generate forecasts, conduct causality analysis, and offer recommendations in just a few clicks. The insights can then be shared directly from Astrato, either via email or Slack.

Annotate/ Add Context with Writeback

Most dashboards are ‘look but don’t touch’; they are purely visual, so users  cannot interact with the dataset. In the ever-changing world of finance, this creates problems regarding data silos and collaboration. The Astrato writeback input form is a simple way for users to add new data entries in real-time, or annotate existing data with valuable context.

Finance targets can be easily updated, meaning progress is monitored more accurately and all team members are reading from the same script, or the same P&L chart in this context.

To Summarize

Astrato makes visualizing financial data easy and accessible to business users, offering meaningful insights from complex financial statements. Intuitive dashboards, insightful visualizations, and cloud-native analytics not only enhance the quality of the BI but the capacity for collaboration in an organization.

Ready to use Astrato for visualizing your financial data? Book a demo with one of our experts!