4 Reasons to Supplement Your Financial Processes with Better Operational Reporting

July 8, 2022

Operational reporting is an effective, results-driven means of tracking, measuring, and analyzing your business’s regular deliverables and metrics. These dynamic reports offer invaluable insights into various logistical aspects relating to your organization’s activities across the board. They’ll help you make swift, informed decisions, save time and money, spot emerging trends and formulate initiatives that will improve the day-to-day operations of your business.

But finance professionals struggle with the tools they currently use for operational reporting. In a recent insightsoftware survey, only 11% of finance professionals said they are happy with their current tools. That means you more than likely aren’t using the right tools designed for your operational reporting needs, and your operational reporting isn’t what it could be.

The Right Pairing

Finding the right comprehensive tools is important. Your FICO reporting needs could be covered by software like insightsoftware’s Wands for SAP, but it’s also critical for Finance to have awareness and understanding of all activities that have an impact on the general ledger.

Without the ability to identify and examine the underlying root causes behind issues that surface in financial reports – such as low revenue – Finance doesn’t have the information needed to have the right conversations with the right functional leaders to research and resolve the issues at hand.

Overcoming Obstacles With Angles for SAP

We’ve outlined four top issues that come from limitations of operational reporting tools and how adding Angles with Wands for SAP will help you overcome them.

Blind Spots and Data Silos

Reading your data, investigating issues, and identifying bottlenecks often requires not just drilling down on FICO/transactional data, but also investigating across the key SAP modules for the operational processes that touch finance for a big picture view. Without comprehensive operational reporting, this lack of visibility impairs Finance’s ability to understand surrounding factors and determine the right path forward.

Loaded with unique, built-in, cross-process intelligence, Angles for SAP makes your ERP transactional data easy to understand. You’ll be able to analyze processes across the entire value chain with hundreds of calculated fields specifically designed to enrich your organization’s data. This means the whole organization, from Finance to supply chain, HR, plant maintenance, compliance and more.

Excel is Not the Answer

Spreadsheets may be the darling of Finance, but not all business users prefer this format for consuming reports. Nowadays, the executive team and wider organization want to understand the full story behind the numbers.

With Angles for SAP, you’ll be able to provide an easy-to-use, self-service interface for business users to create reports or dashboards. This means performing searches using real business language rather than highly technical query languages like SQL or needing in-depth knowledge of SAP’s complicated language.

Too Complex and Inflexible

SAP data models are complex and often difficult to integrate with BI tools. Changes made to the data model will often require technical support. Business users too often rely on data analysts or others within IT who have an expert knowledge of the enterprise data model but lack context of the business problems being reported on.

As a plug-and-play integration for SAP ECC and S/4HANA, thanks to deep understanding of SAP, Angles for SAP enables automatic extraction of your production SAP data by interpreting your company’s SAP data model, application logic, and customizations. Angles for SAP provides you with a contextual understanding of your SAP data without having to go to data analysts or IT who may not understand or grasp the necessary content.

IT Dependence

Generating the actionable insights your business needs to respond to volatile market conditions and outpace your competition is typically a complex process managed by IT. Custom reports or dashboards are requested by business leaders, then delivered by teams of data analysts from the IT team or a partner. The process can often take weeks, if not months, and, in many cases, the report or dashboard is limited to a single use case and applicable only to a single business unit or user – often only the requester.

With Angles for SAP, operational reporting and analytics is in the hands of those who need it – the business users. The easy-to-use interface and pre-built templates take away your dependency on IT to build reports, empowering your finance team and other departments across your organization. When time is critical, you don’t have time to wait weeks or months for reports that show the full story behind financial processes.

For SAP ECC and S/4HANA users, Wands and Angles for SAP bring insightsoftware’s ERPsmarts to your operational reporting processes. With Angles, you can explore all your company’s SAP data, not just what’s in the FICO modules, with a tool that provides you near real-time access within a business-rich context.