Casinos are notoriously challenging when it comes to tracking revenue streams. This is a huge, highly valuable industry (over $400 billion globally) but is made up of thousands of minor transactions both minor and major from a variety of sources. This can present a casino FP&A nightmare. But with the right FP&A solutions for casinos, your gaming organization can turn this nightmare right around.
How?
With the right FP&A solution, many of the more frustrating elements of casino financial planning and analysis can be totally eliminated via:
- Automated data collection
- Advanced forecasting tools
- Real-time data updates
- Comprehensive data gathering that empowers more accurate business decisions
Automated Data Collection for Casinos
A quarter of the global population engages in gambling; that means over a billion people every year will engage with a casino (in-person and/or online) in some form or another.
Of course, your casino is not having billions of people shuffle through each year, but you are seeing a significant portion of the nearby population (not to mention tourists) dropping in to play some games and have some fun.
If your casino features other facilities like a hotel, showroom, restaurant, etc., that means you’ll have money flooding in from a variety of sources.
Collecting all that data can be a massive undertaking for your FP&A team. And one that no doubt takes hundreds of hours each year, preventing these financial experts from actually using their unique knowledge sets to better your business, and instead trapping them in as data jockeys.
But with the right FP&A solution, you can automate that data collection. That means that data from across revenue sources will be automatically collated, saving your team time and allowing them to focus on higher revenue-generating tasks.
What’s more, when you let an algorithm do the grunt work of gathering data from across all these data sources, you also reduce the potential for error and inaccuracies. For an algorithm, scanning through hundreds of spreadsheets is nothing, but for a person, this can be mind-numbing and lead to oversights.
Your FP&A solution should also be able to integrate with your ERP (Sage Intacct, Netsuite, MS Dynamics, etc.) so you can access richer and more holistic data sets.
Consolidate all your data in a centralized location that also makes it easy for your teams to communicate, cutting down on email chasing and making it simple and easy to find all the data you need when performing higher-order FP&A tasks. Speaking of which . . .
Advanced Forecasting Tools for Casinos
Forecasting is a critical element of your financial planning and analysis activities. It helps you plan for the coming years by estimating revenues and expenditures, using past data to inform future predictions.
But when your forecasting is using inaccurate or incomplete data, this can lead to faulty forecasts. This in turn means your FP&A team is wasting their valuable time on a forecasting model that isn’t accurate, informative, or otherwise all that useful.
But a well-built forecast can help you manage your budgets, plan for opportunities (expansions, investments, etc.) that will come when flush with cash, and otherwise empower your organization with the information it needs to properly plan out this year’s finances in advance.
The right FP&A solution for your casino will provide you with a single FP&A platform from which you can perform multiple what-if scenario projections with a number of variables.
The details unlocked by FP&A software also illuminates critical insights into your data that you may have been missing using lesser forecasting tools - or none at all.
Better yet, all these tasks are informed by real-time data updated straight into your FP&A platform.
Real-Time Data Updates
Using old data to make decisions is inefficient and can lead to erroneous business activities. Accessing real-time data, however, without the use of an FP&A platform is next to impossible (or at the very least so time-consuming as to be unrealistic and inefficient).
The right FP&A software will gather real-time data from across your casino organization and consolidate it into a single solution so you always know where you can access it. This makes it easier to adjust on the fly should revenue projections either meet, exceed, or fall below expectations.
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Real-time data can also help inform where to invest time and effort. For instance, if for some reason a particular stream of revenue at your casino is outperforming expectations - let’s say you hire on a performer who is selling more tickets than anticipated - you could leverage this real-time data to sign the performer on for additional dates, ramp up marketing, offer deals based on the performer’s name, etc.
In other words, having access to this real-time data can help your casino maximize its ROI on certain revenue streams and potentially outperform competitors due to the additional agility created by real-time data updates.
Better Business Decisions
Building off how real-time data supports superior decision making, your FP&A solution will also be able to create budget vs actual analysis on the fly.
This means that you can compare current data to past years, allowing you to identify trends and make keen financial decisions based on those trends.
This ability to easily compare across years and identify opportunities as they present themselves at your casino can help drive higher ROI from your FP&A team.
Get FP&A for Casinos from Limelight FP&A Software - Change the Game, Win More with the Right FP&A Solution
Casino FP&A doesn’t have to be difficult. Limelight Software is a leading provider of an advanced FP&A platform that provides all the benefits enumerated above - and more.
Get an FP&A platform that supports your budgeting, forecasting, planning, and analysis activities so they are completed faster - and more accurately - than ever. With our powerful FP&A platform backing your business, you can cut budgeting and reporting times in half while uncovering hundreds of thousands in hidden costs, reduce budget reviews, and give your team its time back.
Save money, get a more comprehensive picture of your business’s financial health, plan and forecast easier - do it all with Limelight. Book a demo to see the platform in action and learn how it can help your business thrive.
