Reporting and Analytics

Financial reporting is a standard accounting process that uses financial statements to disclose a company’s financial status and performance over a particular period, usually on an annual or quarterly basis. In simple terms, a financial report is critical for understanding how much money and capital an organization has, where the money is coming from, and where the money is going. Financial reporting is essential to enable investors and other stakeholders to make informed business decisions based on facts of the company’s financial health. Potential investors and banks will also use a company’s financial statements to decide if they want to invest or loan money to the enterprise. Typical financial reports include the balance sheet, income statement, and statement of changes in financial position also known as cash flow statements.

Management reporting is more targeted to internal stakeholders of an enterprise. The key to effective management reporting is the ability to compare actual results to the original budget, latest forecast or prior periods in order to spot key trends and understand how actual financial and operating results are performing against expectations. Material positive or negative variances in actual results must then be analyzed. In doing that analysis, Finance and operations teams can better understand the underlying issues so that corrective recommendations or decisions can be made to steer the results in the right direction.

Financial reporting software helps organizations generate their financial and management reporting – bringing enterprise data together in a single database where it can be structured and organized and then formatted in a variety of ways. This includes actual financial and operating results, as well as budgets and forecast scenarios. Effective financial and management reporting and analysis can be difficult when the actuals, budgets and forecasts are sitting in multiple spreadsheets or different CPM software applications and must be joined and normalized before a comparison is even possible.

Combining data like this adds extra time and effort to the process and often yields substandard results if the comparisons cannot be supported at the right level of detail. An analysis is much easier to perform when the actuals, plans, budgets and forecasts are all available in the same system, with a common set of reporting tools creating the ability to drill down into the underlying details in real-time to answer questions and quickly take action — in order to lead at speed.

Financial and management reporting ultimately comes in many forms, depending on the needs of the stakeholders. This includes the following:

• Graphical dashboards and scorecards for executives and senior management
• Standard financial statements, board books and presentations for board members, product line or divisional P&Ls for line-of-business management
• Profitability analysis by product, customer or channel for product managers, customer service and channel managers
• Ad-hoc analysis and scenario modeling capabilities for Finance and Operations analysts

Organizations that can standardize on a single financial reporting software solution that can handle the broad reporting and analysis requirements of different stakeholders can generate more timely and accurate results as compared to organizations relying on multiple reporting tools to support their various reporting and analysis requirements.