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.

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.

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.