what they needed to do. We soon realized that, as a high fixed-cost business, it was not just critical to understand the key factors, it is necessary to understand how they are trending over time. There are two key drivers, two key levers and one key result: • Drivers • Call volume • Average sale • Levers • Cost of goods sold • Labor cost • Result • EBITDA(R) By simplifying the focus and minimizing the data, my clients began to warm up to the idea of learning to manage their businesses. BUT, they were still resistant and confused by the tabular format of data. Side note: An analyst would be more comfortable with more “granular” data. For instance, call volume can be broken down into many subcategories, and average sales can be broken down into average sales by category. But, for most people and especially the numberphobic, granularity breeds confusion and confusion results in inaction. Business Intelligence Before Artificial Intelligence Now that my clients were focused on the five priorities, I began to see progress. But I was still challenged by the reluctance to prioritize monitoring those metrics on a regular basis. I realized that tabular data was never going to cut it. Enter Business Intelligence. Business Intelligence turns tabular data into visuals that non-financial people can understand and relate to. In its early stages, having been created by data scientists, Business Intelligence tends toward too much data. As a result, the impact is often about the same as the tabular form. For most people, too much data overwhelms them and confuses them, and the same inaction occurs. The process of manually creating the visuals and then updating them periodically is extraordinarily time-consuming and tedious in the extreme. It is pretty obvious that nontechnical, non-financial people were never going to invest the time to make that happen. Enter Artificial Intelligence There were several challenges (some unique to funeral service) to overcome in order to offer Business Intelligence to multiple firms of all sizes that could be updated with little or no effort at an affordable price: • Even though there is a generally accepted chart of accounts for the profession, most private funeral homes use local accountants who don’t know that. So, there is no consistency. This means that every client’s financial report has to be recast every month into the standardized chart so comparisons can be made against industry targets. • While most private funeral homes use Quickbooks, there is other accounting software, and all must be accommodated. • There are a variety of electronic case management systems that collect data regarding calls, which must also be accommodated. • Funeral homes are notorious for sloppy bookkeeping. This means that items are posted to accounts inconsistently, the timing of revenue and expense is often off by a month or more, and accounts are rarely, if ever, reconciled. This, too, must be accommodated. • Finally, the Cardinal rule: Never, ever, ever upset the bookkeeper. I could satisfy each of these constraints manually but not automatically until software was developed that could be trained to do repetitive tasks once and then repeat them with each addition of new data. In just the last few years, software has been introduced that allows you to train a computer to do just that. So now, after an initial setup, the computer automatically processes new data and updates the visuals. This eliminated the need for clients to all use the same accounting and case management software. In fact, recent innovations allow us to automate the entire process so that clients need to do nothing at all. Not even think about it. And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is very exciting to me. The Deliverable My mission was to create a dashboard that my clients could understand at a glance and then choose to go back to sleep, look into something a little deeper or call someone like me or their accountant. A user should be able to look at the visual and know what to do immediately. Because everyone is familiar with it, I chose to make it look like a car dashboard. I also use the warning Directors Digest | 19
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTg3NDExNQ==