Financial management platform releases productivity-boosting tools

OneStream has unveiled a collection of new productivity-enhancing tools, including allocation models, analytic drill-downs and admin assistance.

"At a time of uncertainty, businesses need a hero," chief executive Tom Shea said.

"Today's news shows how we're putting the power of automation, insight, and self-service directly into the hands of finance teams – in the software they use the most – so they can drive productivity, efficiency and become more agile at a time of increased volatility."

The Productivity Commission identified that Australia’s productivity growth has been dampened by inefficiency and failure to innovate. However, the integration of new tools into workflows could be one way that businesses can operate more efficiently.

According to Michael Plumb, head of econonic analysis for the Reserve Bank, providing workers with better equipment and technologies was one way that productivity could be boosted across the economy.

“Providing workers with more or better capital, like machines or faster computers, can increase the amount of output each worker produces,” Plumb said in a February speech.

OneStream’s new productivity tools have been designed to help finance teams gain deeper insights with less effort and reduce reliance on technical resources, OneStream said in a press release.

For example, its new ‘allocations’ tool provided teams with a no-coding solution designed to assist them in managing allocation models, while their ‘analytic drill-down’ interface allowed users to drill into multiple dimensions at once for real-time variance analysis.

The tools also came with ‘admin assist,’ a suite of over 35 reports and utilities that aimed to simplify security, metadata and performance management.

OneStream announced that its users could now natively combine and analyse data alongside other enterprise sources in Microsoft Fabric, an AI-powered platform that aims to simplify data management and analytics.

The RBA said it expected productivity to increase over time but warned that its projections contained a lot of uncertainty. Productivity growth would depend on firms’ ability to adopt new technologies to deliver more value with less effort.

“Ultimately it’s about how efficiently capital and labour are employed across the economy to produce goods and services,” Plumb said.

“Productivity is not about working harder, but working smarter. Many of the biggest productivity improvements have come from things that have made our lives easier, like computers, robots, the internet and smartphones.”