What does a business analyst do?

Have you ever wondered who offers advice to businesses based on accurate data analysis? If you thought of a business analyst, you are correct.

A business analyst assists companies in assessing their performance, analyze data to help them improve their products, services, processes, systems, and data, and provides solutions to problems found from the analysis.

Most companies need a business analyst to help them make significant business decisions. All thanks to them, businesses can operate efficiently as they continuously evolve.

Table of Contents

1. Identify problems and opportunities for business improvement.

Business analysts help businesses identify problems and opportunities for business improvement. They analyze the industry and help companies understand their business’s possible needs and how to make improvements that would suit their customers.

Identifying problems often require data analysis and needs to be handled with care and knowledge of IT and how a business functions.

2. Analyze the needs and proffer solutions.

After identifying the problems/needs stated above, a business analyst’s responsibility is to analyze the markets. Analysis in this aspect means carefully analyzing why the problem found should be handled immediately by the business.

After analyzing the needs, the next step is to proffer solutions. The business analyst automatically proposes solutions they think would eliminate the business problems.

3. Devising strategies to design or modify business systems or processes

A business analyst is also responsible for developing strategies to create or alter business systems or processes. A strong knowledge of IT and how business systems work is a great way to devise strategies to modify business systems or processes.

4. Budgeting and forecasting

A business analyst is responsible for budgeting a company’s revenue and expense statistics for a specific period. This responsibility involves identifying available cash flows and allocating financial resources and funds according to the company’s required spending.

A business analyst can only budget when they have successfully analyzed the company’s historical trends to predict future business results based on its most up-to-date data. A business analyst must handle these responsibilities over a compressed time frame, as forecasting typically concentrates on direct expenses and revenue line items.

5. Planning and monitoring

Another responsibility of business analysts is planning and monitoring. This responsibility entails how a business analyst determines which actions will be required to complete the business analysis effort. Business analysts often have roles in defining tasks that each analyst or stakeholder has to play. They take time to plan out every approach they would use to achieve better results and deliver reasonable business solutions.

6. Variance analysis

Variance analysis measures actual behavior compared with forecasted or planned behavior. A business analyst has to conduct a variance analysis to determine the difference between expected and actual results, demonstrating how a business’s performance or production process is influenced.

7. Pricing

A business analyst is also responsible for determining the perfect target price of a business product and helping them analyze competitors’ pricing compared with market expectations.

The goal of this responsibility is to assist businesses in determining competitive prices to have gains and generate revenue.

8. Reporting

Business analysts take up the responsibilities of reporting activities to gather and summarize business and process performance metrics in formats prepared to be read, consumed, understood, and acted upon by business owners and key decision-makers that use reporting information to discuss and make business decisions.

Conclusion

Business analysts have so much to do for businesses to thrive and generate revenue. They are the backbone of a company (in a way).

Watch our YouTube video on what a business analyst does.