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US inventor and founding father Benjamin Franklin once wrote that “nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” But you don’t need to be this pessimistic – especially with your business!

Now the new tax year has arrived, you can start bringing certainty to more areas of your organisation by taking advantage of the data you have. By collecting, collating, and creatively analysing your data, you can start to build better plans, find efficiencies, and iron out creases each April.

Here are four ways to get you off to a good start:

1. Forecasting what’s ahead

In preparing for the coming year, using your data insights from previous years can help you forecast your revenue, expenses, stock, and even orders. Using a data warehouse with your organisation’s historical data and combining it with a powerful reporting or analytics solution will give you a chance to effectively see into the future.

Welcome Break wanted to give its branch managers year-on-year insights into the performance of their stores. We built a solution that allowed managers to make quick, well-informed decision about the finances of their branches, along with deeper insights into yearly trends.

2. Logistical and operational planning

As well as forecasting your spending for the next year, you can use data and BI for your logistical and operational planning. For sectors that operate on a just-in-time model, like retail, manufacturing, restaurants, and farming adopting a data-driven approach is invaluable.

G’s Fresh needed a way to store and analyse the data from its agricultural equipment and IoT systems. Its data came from many disparate systems, like drones, tractors, and weather sensors. By creating a way to incorporate all the different sources we were able to help automate many processes and enable a plan for resource allocation.

3. Keep consistent data through changes

The tax year changes, well, yearly. And so too do the rates, codes, and regulations. For example, in the 2023 Spring Budget, UK Chancellor Jeremy Hunt committed to the government’s change in corporation tax rates, while also creating credits for research-intense companies to reduce their tax bills. These changes require you to have a process for keeping, updating, and cleaning your data. You need to be able to modify large amounts of data, without introducing errors, and do it consistently across different data sets. Using a bespoke data warehouse, like the one we created for our client Whitbread (owner of Premier Inn and Beefeater), allows you to do exactly that.

4. Improving efficiencies

Your energy usage is a cost as important as any other. And if you’re in an energy intense sector like manufacturing or logistics, then your costs will be much higher. The emissions output of your organisation will also be directly dependent on the amount and type of energy you use.

The new tax year is the opportunity to use your data to find new efficiencies and improve your sustainability efforts. You can use a bespoke self-service analytics solution to monitor and assess your energy use and adjust your consumption in line with things like price fluctuations. This will help to reduce your bills, emissions, and usage, which is good for you and the environment. Once you’ve collected enough data and done your analysis, you can then start to consider investing in on-premises renewable energy, like solar panels on your warehouses or offices. These can then help to reduce your energy costs further and act as a potential revenue stream if you sell the energy generated back to the national grid.

Whatever your challenges for the new tax year, change++ can help you solve them, your way. By creating bespoke solution using industry-leading platforms, our team can bring the certainty and visibility you need to plan and predict the next 12 months. Explore our solutions.