The fourth quarter holds a lot of weight. It’s a last-ditch effort to bring in as much business as possible before the end of the fiscal year, but it also allows upper-management to assess the financial health of your company and prepare for a stronger start to Q1. That said, most teams are hustling their way through Q4 to get any final sales or campaigns over the line. It’s not uncommon for teams to cut corners on repetitive tasks to give more attention to projects that will contribute to the overarching business goals.
Now, with artificial intelligence the more mundane tasks can be automated to free up time for bigger revenue-driving efforts. Here are six ways teams can leverage AI tools for a stronger Q4 to end the fiscal year.
Q4 planning
Planning is crucial for the success of a team, and a presentation helps you communicate those plans to key stakeholders. The presentation acts as a platform to help keep all of your team members on the same page, ensuring that they understand their roles, responsibilities, and how they fit into the overall plan for the quarter. There are plenty of customizable presentation templates available to guide your own content, but AI can also help you generate a presentation from scratch tailored to your unique business plan. In an AI presentation software— like Beautiful.ai— enter a prompt describing what you need. Example: “Create a Q4 marketing plan presentation for a b2b SaaS start-up that wants to increase brand awareness, convert leads to new users, and launch a campaign promoting a new product feature.” You might also upload your own business documents, or notes from a recent marketing brainstorm, so help generate more relevant AI results.
Project management
Projects aren’t one-size-fits-all, and how you treat one project may differ from the next. However, regardless of the task or campaign, project management is critical for keeping things on track. Defining milestones and deadlines, updating key stakeholders, acknowledging blockers, and organizing assets make for more successful projects. AI models can forecast project completion dates by weighing various project parameters, helping teams set realistic deadlines. Similarly, AI-powered bots and scripts can automate routine administrative tasks, such as data entry, email notifications, and status updates. Leveraging AI for project management in Q4 can give teams back more time to focus on the actual projects themselves.
Budget review and proposals
Nobody likes a budget (yeah, we said it). But in order to keep your business on a healthy path towards profitability, a budget is important. Luckily, in Q4 you have the previous 3 quarters to guide you to the most realistic budget to finish out the fiscal year strong. Crunching numbers can be tedious, but artificial intelligence can help you with different pieces of your budget planning to improve efficiency. Data analysis and forecasting, expense categorization and tracking, personalized recommendations, generating financial reports or proposal presentations, ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements, expense predictions, spreadsheets, and simplifying the auditing process are things that can be automated by different AI tools.
Compiling reports in a presentation
The beauty about AI is that there are few limitations to what it can help you do at your desk. Think of it as your personal assistant to help you wrap up the year. Need to plug reports into a deck to present to your boss(es), but you are pressed for time? There’s an AI tool for that: Beautiful.ai. DesignerBot’s new context feature allows you to upload reports, and other proprietary documents, from previous quarters and turn them into fully developed slides. Simply add a prompt asking DesignerBot to create a report on performance from the previous quarter, and add additional context via your real data. This removes the need to manually build and update each chart or graph within your deck, and instead populates them automatically with your most important metrics.
Refining KPIs
Key performance indicators (KPIs) give teams goals for the quarter, target milestones to hit to help gauge progress, and provide insights for important decisions across the company. Most teams will have different KPIs depending on the quarter to help keep business efforts moving forward. Things like data, patterns, and forecasting will all play an important role in defining KPIs, but the analysis takes time that many managers simply don’t have. Insert: artificial intelligence. Luckily, AI was made for monotonous tasks. The technology can easily process data, identify trends, or predict future outcomes based on historical data which gives managers the framework to set more realistic goals for their team.
With the time-saved, managers can plug each employees’ KPIs into a presentation to help communicate their expectations more effectively.
Preparing end of year reviews
What are the key details you should be including in your end of year reviews to set your team up for success? Sure, there’s countless resources on the world wide web, but sorting through search engine results can be a time suck. Instead, let AI inform an outline specific to the industry, department, and role. This will give you a jumping off point that you can tailor to each employee for a more effective end of year review.
Need to throw your end of year review in a presentation? AI can do that, too. You can either upload your review documents into smart presentation softwares— like Beautiful.ai— and watch the blocks of text transform into beautiful slides, or prompt the AI to create a customizable presentation from scratch.
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