Breaking Down Data Silos with Microsoft Fabric

Abhi Jayanty – Quorum

Accountancy practice management software has come a long way. Today, features like automated billing and reconciliations are easily integrated into the day-to-day practice workflow of Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting UK customers.

Our employees work side by side with our customers to create and manage these solutions – driven by a deep understanding of their needs and addressing the rapid changes in their environment.

However, it’s often hard to look beyond improving performance in day-to-day operations. Amid Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic and other disruptions, accountancy practices and their clients are dealing with an unpredictable economic landscape. Future business planning can appear daunting.

However, technology can support accountancy practices (and their clients) in making informed business decisions, and planning for the future. In the first part of our Accountancy Practice Management for Future-Fit Growth series, we’ll explore how they can use technology to define and easily track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Doing so gives practices closer control of performance tracking, and deeper insights that will inform strategic growth plans.

Saving Time

For several decades, business technology platforms have enabled practices to track performance metrics that they have customised. This highlights areas that qualify for improvement and underpins strategic planning.

Contemporary technology, such as CCH KPI Monitoring, makes setting up KPIs faster and easier for accountancy practices than ever before. This is vital today. The current business landscape demands that firms assess and amend KPIs more frequently, based on fresh market variables. KPIs such as client retention rate and business time-to-recovery have become increasingly prominent performance indicators in the past year. If clunky technology makes KPI management difficult, practices have less time and insight to plan future growth.

Reducing Risk
CCH KPI Monitoring makes it far easier to track KPIs and report on them. This is fundamental in minimising risk. For example, if a KPI is set to track and escalate debt filtered by overdue dates, the ability to easily set alerts and automatically generate reports is critical to practice performance management.

Some practices are manually running monthly reports to measure KPIs. Others are running real-time reporting engines, a key feature of CCH KPI Monitoring. This latter solution allows practices to review essential data at any time – covering both performance management and compliance requirements. They can do so remotely or on-premise.

This means that firms can assess issues before they become problems, and thus act proactively. Real-time reporting is a true asset in building a future-fit practice.

The Proof is in the Practice
A number of Wolters Kluwer customers have been using CCH KPI Monitoring for several years now. Our customers look to us when they need to be right. Ryecroft Glenton has successfully integrated CCH KPI Monitoring with its own system. This consolidates information from several sources, including CCH Central and CCH Practice Management.

“We can use the year end date to trigger a sequence of reminders. Have we asked for the books? Have they been received? If a request to a client has been outstanding for a certain period, the partner will receive an alert via email. For limited companies, we can monitor the corporation tax and Companies House filing deadlines – as well as the different deadlines for pension schemes”

– Ian Smith, partner at Ryecroft Glenton

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

“Apogee are not just aprinting company, theyconsult with us and go onto deliver a full end to endservice from concept toinstallation. They go aboveand beyond and we lookforward to continuing ourjourney with them”

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

“Apogee are not just aprinting company, theyconsult with us and go onto deliver a full end to endservice from concept toinstallation. They go aboveand beyond and we lookforward to continuing ourjourney with them”

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

“Apogee are not just aprinting company, theyconsult with us and go onto deliver a full end to endservice from concept toinstallation. They go aboveand beyond and we lookforward to continuing ourjourney with them”

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

“Apogee are not just aprinting company, theyconsult with us and go onto deliver a full end to endservice from concept toinstallation. They go aboveand beyond and we lookforward to continuing ourjourney with them”

Data silos are more than just an inconvenience – they're a fundamental productivity killer across all business functions. Businesses often find that data across departments are disconnected from other parts of the organisation and are frequently duplicated, inconsistent, inaccurate or just out-of-date.

Without the right understanding and consolidation of your organisation’s data, data silos will continue to be a problem. It is imperative to create a ‘single source of truth’; one centralised location for data to be stored, maintained and governed.

The key problem

Imagine a world where Bob from payroll creates a summary in Excel and emails it to Alice from tax, who copies it into her spreadsheet that only she keeps and manages on her laptop. Meanwhile, the finance team stores client invoices in a completely separate system with its own database, and the audit team has to deal with multiple bespoke compliance tools to get any work done.

If Bob updates one record, it takes countless manual exports and reconciliation tasks to align data across the firm and keep filings accurate due to siloed data and no centralised data source. This becomes a daily headache, increasing discrepancies and inefficiencies across teams with no real collaboration.

What is the Solution to Eliminating Data Silos?

Data analytics platforms have evolved to bridge the gap between disparate source systems and differing tools for data analysis, with Microsoft’s Fabric data platform offering a unified experience by combining storage, data transformations and analysis tools under one system.

An overview of the various components of the Microsoft Fabric platform

Microsoft Fabric removes the complexity in building data solutions, offering numerous data storage options that all sit on top of the ‘OneLake’: a single, unified, logical data lake for the entire organisation. Described as ‘the OneDrive for data’, OneLake is designed to store one copy of data for use in multiple analytical workloads in Fabric.

Compliance and governance is built-in, with integration of Microsoft Purview for governance and Sustainability Solutions that uses pre-built definitions to store data and insights according to Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) standards and other regulatory requirements.

How Can Fabric Transform Your Accounting Workflow?   

Bob can now simply maintain his payroll file stored in OneLake and Alice can automatically access this data through a Power BI dashboard. The finance and audit teams can run queries and analysis at any given time on simplified data that aligns with their bespoke software, no longer having to manually cross-reference records against hidden-away local-copy spreadsheets named “payroll_v3_final_final2.xlsx”. C-level executives can run their quarterly reports on combined data across all business functions with ease.

Fabric architecture overview showcasing analytical engines and source configurations

With Fabric, you don't need to assemble different services from multiple vendors. Fabric is designed to be used by business users, offering various low/no-code experiences to build data movement and transformation processes. It offers unprecedented flexibility when working with data such as:

Data ingestion from sources ranging from local files to third-party CRM systems,
Analysis and visualisation of data through Excel, Power BI reports, T-SQL, Python and more,
Mirroring and shortcuts from external data sources to reduce data movement,
Integration with Microsoft 365 tools,
Copilot support when developing Fabric items.

Fabric also offers more advanced workloads, with data science capabilities to build models to allow effortless forecasting, anomaly detection and further predictive analysis of central business data stored in Fabric. Automation in Fabric allows for valuable time-saving use cases such as automatic refreshing of recurring reports, pipelines and ‘reflexes’ that can be set to automatically action alerts and data processing.

For example, a client transaction crosses a suspicious threshold? Alerts can automatically get sent to your anti-money laundering teams, with data marked for review, all without manual intervention.

The Bottom Line   

No matter how powerful the capabilities of Microsoft Fabric are and how simple it is to start building efficient data solutions, it is more important than ever to have good data architecture practices. Data silos can only be broken down when business objectives and reporting requirements are understood across the firm, with everyone collaborating and aligning to a way of working with a data platform that keeps data secure, simplified and central.

Quorum has a proven track record in building a strong data culture within organisations. We are experienced in bespoke solutions design and deployment while offering training and ongoing support.

Contact us today and let us help you gain control of your most valuable asset – your data.

Abhi Jayanty is a Data Engineer and data analytics enthusiast specialising in the Azure data platform, Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, and SQL Server. With multiple Azure certifications, Abhi is passionate about developing and sharing my knowledge and eagerly take any opportunity to present and speak on topics he explored and mastered.
Dec 2024

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