How real-time financial reporting makes tribal gaming organizations more agile
- Many tribal gaming organizations rely on disconnected systems, including manual spreadsheets and siloed data sources, which leads to lengthy month-end closes and forces leaders to make decisions based on outdated information.
- Integrating financial systems powers real-time reporting and creates a single source of data. This allows leadership to move from reactive, backward-looking decisions to proactive and agile data-driven planning.
- Automated data integration reduces the manual burden on accounting teams, freeing them from data collection and reconciliation tasks while decreasing the risk of errors.
Too many tribal gaming organizations are making key financial decisions based on old data. Disconnected systems force accounting teams to spend more time manually entering data into spreadsheets instead of focusing on financial modeling — leaving tribal gaming leaders forced to react to past events rather than plan proactively.
However, an integration between your ERP and other source systems via an integration platform as a service (iPaaS), APIs or other solutions can help your team dramatically reduce time spent collecting and organizing data while giving you clear, real-time insights you can use to make smarter financial decisions.
Keep reading to learn why more tribal gaming organizations are turning to system integrations, plus how to start using one yourself.
Why do so many gaming organizations struggle with slow reporting?
Tribal gaming organizations often struggle with slow reporting because accounting teams have to pull together data from so many different disconnected sources. As a result, your leadership team is perpetually looking backwards rather than making decisions based on real-time information.
- To complete a month-end close for your organization, you likely have to account for reporting from slot machines, ATMs, vault counts and table games, plus concessions, food service and hospitality.
- You also have to gather data on player statistics: Who comes in, how long do they play and where do they stay?
- For many casino organizations, this data comes from disconnected systems. This means accounting teams often end up organizing it all in handmade spreadsheets, which then have to be audited and checked for errors.
- As a result, month-end close often takes up to two weeks or more. This slow, resource-intensive process means that leaders are forced to make key financial decisions on a quarterly basis rather than quickly adapting to real-time information.
How does real-time reporting help casino gaming leaders make better decisions?
Real-time financial reporting allows your organization to shift from slowly reacting to making proactive decisions. By implementing an integration between your different financial data sources, you can automatically bring all of that data into your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system so your leadership team can get a clear picture of what your finances look like in real time.
- By combining an ERP like Sage Intacct with an integration, you can create a single source of truth for all your financial data.
- This is fully automated, so your accounting team no longer has to spend countless hours collecting and organizing data in spreadsheets. Instead, you can put that time into analyzing your data and creating financial projections to guide your decision-making process.
- Organizations that do this become more agile and are no longer stuck just reacting to problems that may have occurred a month or more in the past.
How do casino leaders implement real-time reporting?
Successful real-time reporting depends on using an integration like an iPaaS solution or APIs to automatically pull data from sources like slots, table games and food service, then feeding it into your ERP. Here are the high-level steps to implement an integration:
1. Find an advisor
A customized integration can be relatively simple to implement — if you know what you’re doing. That’s why it’s essential to work with an advisory firm that can help you decide which integration path fits your specific needs and provide the technical support to put it into place.
2. Assess which systems you need to connect
Map out all of your existing data sources that you’d like to integrate. Dig into the specifics of these different systems. In some situations, you may be able to use APIs to connect everything with your ERP directly, while in others, you may be better served by using an iPaaS solution.
3. Implement your new software solutions
This is where you actually connect your disparate systems via an integration. If you don’t already have an ERP in place, you would need to implement that as well. Depending on the size, amount of source systems and complexity of your organization, you may be able to get this done in a month, although larger, more complex casinos will need additional time.
What is an iPaaS solution?
An iPaaS solution is a cloud-based software tool that gathers data from multiple systems or sources. This is the key that unlocks real-time financial reporting for casinos.
For casino gaming organizations, a customized iPaaS solution essentially serves as a connector piece that feeds data collected from a wide range of on-premise sources into an ERP or other financial platform for reporting and analysis. This is an automated process that delivers current financial data to decision-makers.
What roadblocks can hinder a real-time financial reporting solution?
Achieving real-time financial reporting via an integration is often a fairly straightforward process. However, there can be challenges your organization may need to overcome.
Improperly categorized data
If your data isn’t clean or properly categorized in the source system, this will be an additional hurdle that will need to be addressed during the implementation process. Likewise, if your current ERP system isn’t in good shape, you’ll need to address that.
Pushback from leadership
Leadership buy-in can also be a factor. To help your leadership see the value of integrated data collection, they may first need to understand how much of a mess a non-integrated system is to deal with — in terms of time spent, accuracy issues and slow reporting turnaround.
Staff being resistant to change
Accounting team members may understandably feel concerned that automation could cost them their jobs. It won’t — but it will change them. An integration means your team will spend much less time gathering data and much more time analyzing it.
How Wipfli can help
We help tribal gaming organizations make smarter financial decisions via real-time financial reporting. Ask us to assess your current systems, suggest a plan to deliver real-time reporting and work with your team to implement. Start with a conversation.
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