Data spoken here… It’s a language just like financial figures!

Entrepreneurs with no heads for figures

You know those cringeworthy, toe-curling moments in the Dragons’ Den… A hopeful entrepreneur is on a roll, going toe-to-toe with the excited Dragons and the little ole’ question of ‘the figures’ comes up…

How many times have we seen entrepreneurial wannabes fall at this hurdle, through failing to have a good grasp of the key numbers on the financial performance of their ventures?

One of the underlying problems is that some people just don’t get along well with numbers. Unfortunately, if you are a Dragons’ Den hopeful, you need to get up to speed, or at least have someone on your team who does have a head for figures!

There needs to be a clear understanding of the accuracy of each figure, its definition, and its meaning. How many visitors to the Den have we seen whose pitch failed because they did not seem to understand the difference between ‘gross’ and ‘net’?

It’s a similar situation when it comes to empirical business information, such as the data of a recruitment agency. Data points given on their own in isolation are rather meaningless. What a specific metric represents needs to be clearly defined and contextualised.

For example, just seeing a monthly gross sales figure is rather meaningless, unless we clearly define what we mean by ‘gross sales’, and have some context by understanding how the statistic compares to the previous month. We can have greater context if we can see the most recent month in relation to successive preceding months.

Deeper analysis from which recruiters benefit

Historically, spreadsheets have been the standard way of manipulating data to generate standard business reporting. Spreadsheet experts or power users (AKA ‘Excel Jockeys’ to some) could also use their skills to create non-standard reports.

Practically every aspect of today’s businesses has some kind of touchpoint with a digital system. Across your business, today’s cloud apps and platforms generate vast amounts of data. However, not every recruitment business obtains the benefit of this data.

The reason for this might be that you don’t have the means of access and the skills to manipulate the data, preventing you from performing the deeper and more comprehensive analysis that many other recruiters benefit from.

Ride the new wave of analytics with Caspian

Recent years have seen data science theory, practice and technologies make remarkable progress. Once a luxury for large enterprises, powerful analytics tools are now available to recruitment businesses of all sizes.

Caspian is the latest innovation from the ETZ ‘lab’. Caspian combines your agency’s ETZ data with all the information from the other software apps and platforms you use to run your agency. This creates a centralised data lake which it then analyses and structures into a data warehouse.

Caspian provides a KPI dashboard of key figures, custom reporting that allows you to analyse elements of data from across the different sources that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to look at.

Standard report templates include:

• Consultant Commission
• Invoice And Payment Summary
• Purchase Invoice Day Book
• Sales Invoice Day Book
• Split Margin
• Timesheet Chaser

Get the full value of your agency data with ETZ

Whether it’s software such as ATS, CRM, accounting or ETZ timesheets, Caspian lets you get the full value from all the apps and platforms that you have in your agency’s software stack. With Caspian, you get the ability to analyse how your business is performing, identify trends and understand where to make improvements.

Our market leading timesheet, invoicing and payment solution lets recruitment agencies execute error free back office processing, for all agency workers and contractors. To find out more, call us on 0800 311 2266 or book a demo.