10 Best Analytical Tools for Business: Experts Guide

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” As the adage goes, business analysis helps companies by thoroughly reviewing every area of their operations with the goal of identifying needs that are unique to the business and formulating solutions to those problems.

A properly conducted business analysis can be a tremendous driver of positive change for a business in terms of both efficiency and profitability. Analytical tools for business, such as software, can radically improve the efficacy of a business analysis.

In this article, we’ll explore some of our favorite choices for analytical tools to see how they can help you achieve your business goals.

Coming Up

What is Business Analysis?

Why is a Business Analysis Important?

What Are Business Analysis Tools?

What is the Difference Between Business Analytics and Business Intelligence Solutions?

What Are the 10 Best Tools for Business Analytics?

What is the Best Analysis Software?

Wrapping Up

What is Business Analysis?

Regardless of how “well” a business seems to be running, there are always stress points in the operation that can fail with very little warning; something which also typically happens at the worst time.

In many cases, these stress points were hiding in plain sight, but the everyday grind of business prevented them from being seen until it was too late. However, a business analysis can find these weak points and address them before they become problematic using analytical Tools for business.

Business analysis is the science of analyzing businesses for the purposes of identifying problems that the business is facing and crafting solutions to those problems. In a proper business analysis, every area of the company’s operation will come under review, and the business analyst will consider how and where they can be improved.

However, in many cases, businesses neither have the resources nor the time to employ a business analyst to get the information they need in a timely manner.

This is where business analysis software like SolveXia can be a game changer. SolveXia is finance automation software that enables any business to access knowledge by running analytics and using customized dashboards from real-time data effortlessly.

Why is a Business Analysis Important?

Imagine having the finest race car in the world, but not making sure that all the spark plugs are firing or enough oil is in the engine before the race begins.

This is of course an impossibility in a professional race car, because they are subject to a thorough set of checks and tests before every race to make sure the car is safe and tuned for optimum performance.

Much like auto racing, the business world is incredibly competitive, and operating at peak efficiency can be the difference between surpassing quarterly projections, or falling short of them entirely.

Proactively conducting business analysis allows companies to identify problem areas and improve them before they negatively impact performance and profitability.

Using a tool like SolveXia, your team will save time through process automation. In turn, your employees will be able to work smarter and deliver more customer value. With SolveXia, processes have 90% fewer errors and decrease risk, providing greater peace of mind and internal control.

What Are Business Analysis Tools?

Business analysis tools are the analytical tools and techniques business analysts use to do their work. One of the most powerful of these tools is business analytics software. These programs allow anyone (not just analysts) to capture and review important data from both a quantitative and a qualitative perspective.

In a typical business analysis, companies will employ several types of business analytics, such as data mining, statistical analysis, and even predictive intelligence.

Having powerful data analytics software allows businesses to employ all these tools simultaneously in a user friendly platform. This is important because it allows decision makers to get the data they need without the data collection itself becoming the most arduous part of the business analysis process.

What is the Difference Between Business Analytics and Business Intelligence Solutions?

Business analytics and business intelligence solutions are both critically important types of analytical tools and techniques. They sound like the same thing, but they are very different.

The key difference between the two is that business intelligence revolves around analyzing data that a business has already compiled and using it to determine how a business should react, or improve its reactions, to current conditions.

By contrast, business analytics is more focused on scenario planning; it uses data to predict future market conditions, how they will affect a company and how a company’s potential responses to those future conditions might affect its performance.

So, business intelligence is focused on analyzing a company’s past and present, whereas business analytics helps companies analyze data to prepare for the future.

What Are the 10 Best Tools for Business Analytics?

There are several different types of analytical tools for business; which business analytics tool is right for your company depends on what kind of business you have and what aspect of the business you wish to analyze. Keep reading to find our top 10 tools:

1. SWOT Analysis

SWOT analysis looks at a business in terms of its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The strengths and weaknesses portion refers to individual factors inside of the business, such as personnel, expenses, and facilities.

The opportunities and threats portion looks outward at areas where the company can gain strength in the market, or how adverse market conditions may hurt the company.

2. PEST Analysis

PEST analysis examines a business in terms of political, economical, sociological and technological factors and how they could potentially affect a business. The political analysis looks at both current and predicted political climates and plots a course through them.

Economics considers the short and long term economic picture, while the sociological analysis looks at how the community at large impacts company decisions. Technological analysis examines how developing technology will affect a business.

3. MOST Analysis

MOST is an acronym for Mission, Objective, Strategies and Tactics. Businesses use it to determine what their core mission is, their strategic objective and what are the best tactics for achieving that objective.

4. Heptalysis

This is a seven step tool that is used to analyze the following factors: market opportunity, product or solution, execution plan, financial engine, human capital, potential return, and margin of safety.

No business can proceed without a complete understanding of all these elements, all of which are key to scenario planning.

5. De Bono's Six Big Thinking Hats

Every business comes to a place where it’s time to try some fresh ideas. This tool incorporates six different analytical moods to come up with new tactics or products. Those moods are logic, creativity, positivity, negativity, emotions, and ability to control.

Whatever the new idea is should be creative, while still making sense, scalable and capable of generating positive emotions among the customer base.

6. Catwoe

CATWOE involves setting a limited amount of time for business owners to brainstorm new ideas while accounting for the following six factors: customers, actors, transformation process, world view, owners and environmental constraints.

7. Five Whys

This is an excellent analytical tool for businesses trying to solve a problem that has recently manifested itself. Begin by acknowledging the existence of a problem and then asking “why”?

By repeating the process four more times, for a total of five whys, businesses should have a complete idea of not only the main problem, but the root causes of it.

8. MoSCoW

This is an analytical tool and technique for companies that need to address multiple problems at once. Much like triage in a military hospital, the MoSCoW method prioritizes tasks in order of importance by using the following four metrics: must have, should have, could have, and won’t have.

9. SCRS

This four step analytical tool focuses on taking account of a company’s current situation and plotting a course forward. SCRS is an acronym, with the following steps: strategy, current state, requirements and solution.

10. VPEC-T

This analytics tool is an acronym for values, events, content and trust. Businesses use it when they have multiple executives or departments making a collective decision about how to move forward.

Any method you choose to use can be optimized with the aid of automation software. Automation software, like SolveXia, equipped with analytical capabilities ingests data from all your connected sources and provides you with real-time insights to make informed business decisions.

What is the Best Analysis Software?

Conducting business analysis is a complicated, and incredibly important task. In fact, it’s so important that there are professional business analysts who provide this service under contract.

Whether companies employ a business analyst or use business analytical tools to conduct their own analysis, analytical tools for business make it easier to gather, organize and display the information companies need to make the most thorough analysis possible. Some of the best business analysis software includes:

1. SolveXia

Finance teams are turning to SolveXia to help make their staff more productive and successful. The low-code platform automates spreadsheet-driven data preparation and manual processes without any need for dedicated IT teams.

SolveXia offers one of the most comprehensive and powerful finance automation software packages available when it comes to data analysis. It can be used by staff without needing IT. There is no need for coding expertise to collect, analyze and display a wide range of datasets.

It is compatible with almost all legacy software companies have previously been using to track data, accounting and sales information. SolveXia also combines, manipulates, calculates and transforms your data into rich insights.

SolveXia is an out-of-the-box solution that has a user-friendly interface and can be up and running in less than 30 minutes!

Along with data analysis capabilities, SolveXia’s suite of solutions also includes expense analytics, account reconciliation, process automation, regulatory reporting, and more.

2. Board

Board is a powerful analytics software that offers many features, such as business analytics, performance management and analytically based insights to business owners; all of which helps the owners and executives make better decisions.

However, it is not the easiest software to use out of the box and requires a significant amount of time to master its capabilities.

3. Excel

Excel is one of the first widely used software by business analysts. It allows skilled users to program formulas, take in data and create incredibly impressive graphics and charts to go with the analysis.

However, like Board, Excel requires a highly skilled user to fully exploit its capabilities, which means many companies end up overly dependent on one or two “experts” to manage it.

Additionally, Excel data is not automatically shared or updated in real time among users, meaning some critical data may not always be accurate.

4. Looker

Looker offers its users an all web based data analysis software tool that any company employee can use and update in real time from anywhere they have internet access.

Its main strengths lie in its ability to use its innovative data modeling features, which allow even novice users to gain access to deep, insightful data and present them with high quality visuals.

However, it’s also a very expensive software tool, meaning it may not be ideal for small businesses to medium sized businesses on a budget.

5. SAS

SAS is a very well known, and universally respected data analytics software tool. Not only is it easy to learn, it’s powerful, and capable of handling incredibly large volumes of data.

It features a high level of data security and proven algorithms that can get decision makers the information they need quickly and efficiently. With that said, it’s expensive, and requires licenses to use all of its capabilities. It is also not the best software for creating quality graphics.

Wrapping Up

Businesses are much like animals in nature, in that they are either always evolving, or they are making a slow march towards extinction.

Conducting a thorough business analysis, with the aid of the best analytical tools for business, is one of the best steps businesses can take to make sure it is evolving forward instead of slowly losing ground to its competitors.

Using the best software can make the business analysis process easier, more efficient and more productive.

Looking to give an analytics tool like SolveXia a try to gain more accurate and real-time insights? We’re here to show you how. Request a demo today to see what you stand to gain.