Pulling out her tablet, the CFO quickly studies financial intelligence dashboards powered by Autonomous Data Warehouse using Oracle Analytics Cloud. Let’s look at revenue first.

Click Revenue widget

Key Insight
Revenue KPIs show the business will end the year below plan.

Operating expenses also look like they’re trending up. Let’s zoom in.

Click Operating Expenses widget

Key Insight
Definitely looks like this is a big factor in the negative impact on profitability.

The system recommends reviewing the end of year sales forecast to see if the business can close some of the upside deals and thereby meet the revenue target.

Let’s take a look.

Click Sales Forecast tab

Key Insight
Analytics based on sales forecast data loaded into the finance datamart, powered by Autonomous Data Warehouse, reveal that the current Q4 revenue forecast will not meet FY budget. We’ll make a note that we need to discuss the reliability of the forecast and the possibility to close additional deals with sales management.

Let’s start by loading all appropriate data spreadsheets that might help in our analysis.

Click Create button

Click Data Flow

First, let’s load financial data.

Click Financial data set

Click the + symbol to begin adding T&E and payroll data to the mix.

Click Add Data

Select both spreadsheets

Finally, click the + symbol to save this new combined data set.

Click Save Data

The new combined data set has now been saved.

The UK finance dashboard reveals rising troublesome trends in “OPEX by Account Group”. Let’s examine this trend further.

Click graph

The graph reveals “Salary & Wages” and “Travel and Expense (T&E)” as key culprits.

Let’s investigate if “OPEX Planning” reveals further details.

Click OPEX Planning

Across the board, we plainly see a negative trend in the last few months.

For T&E, expenses have started to exceed both budget and previous year’s numbers, starting around July/August.

Investigating “Out of Policy T&E” , hotel expenses spike around July/August and it continues to be a problem. Better make a note to alert the sales managers.

As for the “Salary & Wages” issue, starting in August we’ve exceeded both the budget and last year’s numbers.

From external payroll data, we find overtime pay started to increase from July at the same time as base salaries show a drop in August. This seems like too much of a coincidence. What could be the cause behind all this?

Drilling into payroll data, overtime hours match the same July/August spike, where we see a trend up in the call center.

Simultaneously, the call center had a huge staff turnover in July and has had a hard time filling the open job positions.

Combined data from various sources in the HCM system reveals many young, low salary employees have left the business around that same timeframe. But why are they leaving?

A word cloud, using data collected from an employee survey, sheds light on why employees may be leaving.

Better share with the hiring managers and HR, who can brainstorm ideas to address retention and hiring issues.