The Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) tech stack is becoming increasingly diverse, but often remains siloed.
There is a growing divide between spreadsheets, web-based FP&A software, and traditional business intelligence (BI) tools. While each of these has different strengths and use cases, the challenge lies in their lack of integration together, leading to fragmented data, inefficiencies, and mismatched insights.
- Spreadsheets: Excel and Google Sheets are still the backbone of most FP&A processes, offering unmatched flexibility. And when it comes to familiarity, spreadsheets remain the most universally understood and used tool within finance departments. However, they are not perfect, lacking real-time data connections and collaboration features that can start to break down at scale (unless you’re using Aleph, of course).
- Web-based FP&A Software: These tools are designed around real-time data connections and enhanced collaboration. They aim to streamline processes, reduce spreadsheet sprawl, and provide a more user-friendly experience. However, they can sometimes fall short of the flexibility and depth that complex financial models and reporting require, leading teams to revert to spreadsheets for many needs.
- Business Intelligence Tools: BI tools are fantastic for data visualizations, offering beautiful, powerful analytics and deep insights, but they often require significant expertise to set up and use effectively. Deep integrations with financial data sources can be challenging, especially for FP&A teams that tend to fall last when needing help from engineering and data teams.
As finance, and specifically, FP&A, continues to take a front seat at the strategy table, there’s a growing need to bridge these gaps and unify these siloed capabilities with a single source of truth—and, ideally, one platform that can check all three solution boxes.
Solving FP&A data and tool sprawl with a unified approach
Aleph was founded on the premise that spreadsheets are, and will remain, the most flexible tool of choice by finance professionals. So, we set out on a mission to supercharge them, solving the real-time data and collaboration flaws that had been holding spreadsheets back from becoming a scalable, enterprise-wide FP&A solution.
Our spreadsheet-native mission didn’t mean we didn’t believe in web-native approaches. On the contrary, we knew we would get there eventually but needed to do it strategically. Building the most powerful data layer and connecting it to the most popular tool—spreadsheets—was simply the starting point, not the final destination.
The next phase of our journey is here with the introduction of dashboards, providing a BI-like data visualization layer to aggregate, spotlight, and share key metrics, trends, and answers across your business.
Dashboards plug directly into all the cross-system data that runs your business. Not only does that include financial data from your ERP and spreadsheet-based financial models, but also HRIS, CRM, billing systems, product analytics, operational databases, other data warehouses, and the list goes on.
The Aleph platform ingests, consolidates, and transforms all of this data, giving finance a single source of truth without relying on engineers or data scientists who live in other departments.
With the addition of dashboards to our platform, finance teams are in complete control over how they work with and share business data using spreadsheets—and now web-based data visualization and intelligence tools.
- Spreadsheet power users can stay within their comfort zone of using Excel and Google Sheets for most of their core FP&A needs, working with live source data, and pushing their spreadsheets back into the Aleph warehouse.
- Dashboards organize and spotlight metrics via the web app, providing instant answers and gratification, especially when collaborating with teams outside of finance who are not as comfortable digging and digesting data in cells.
Bridging the gap between these tools didn’t just mean unifying the data, it meant unifying the experience, querying and formatting data with the same pivot table and SUMIF-like functions found in Aleph’s spreadsheet add-ins.
It also provides the same drill-down capabilities to unearth and understand the underlying data behind any metric or movement.
With dashboards, even non-technical stakeholders can feel like they’re data scientists, spotting trends and doing deep analysis on the fly.
Mission control for your mission-critical metrics
For most finance teams, the lowest-hanging fruit is to build out executive summaries and department-level OpEx reviews, personalizing spreadsheet-based reporting packages in a format that is easier to access and digest for different stakeholders.
While the initial intent of dashboards may have been to organize mission-critical financial metrics, we’re already seeing a proliferation outward to monitor sales pipeline, product usage, broader SaaS metrics, and so much more.
The possibilities are almost endless with the breadth and depth of Aleph’s 150+ no-code data connectors. If the data lives in Aleph, you can visualize it in a dashboard. The final product is blossoming into a company-wide, wiki-like experience for a wide range of metrics, KPIs, charts, and data tables.
- Build your dream dashboards one block at a time with a no-code editor
- Create unlimited dashboards, keeping them organized with pages and sections
- Customize the layouts, colors, labels, groupings, and more
- Control view and edit access with user and team permissions
- Export charts as an image to share in emails, slack, or wherever you may need them
- Sync live charts directly into PowerPoints or Google Slides
Getting started
Want to see Aleph dashboards in action? Book a demo to get a personalized tour. If you like what you see, we'll let you connect your data and try it for free.
