As a general rule, most business people are surrounded by data.  We enter it into lots of systems, keep it in notebooks or maybe we create a spreadsheet or two.  Your financials, like your profit and loss or balance sheet report are pretty handy at telling you what has happened and that’s pretty valuable information.  It doesn’t stop there though.

You often need more non-financial data in addition to financial data so you can identify what’s going on, and make predictions. or just make decisions based on something other than a guess.

You absolutely need good financial data to make sure you fulfil your tax and reporting obligations.  You need good analysis because business risk exists. We all face risk to our business, but at the heart of it, risk represents the impact of what we don’t know for certain. We can mitigate risk through good quality analysis and understanding.  That means understanding the environment and ourselves by utilising information to underpin