Spend Less Time on Report Creation and More Time on Analysis

November 15, 2022

You know the old saying “work smarter, not harder?” Turns out that’s easier said than done. How can your finance team transform the way it works and add strategic value to your organization? How can you shift your focus from menial tasks to tactical execution, and ultimately from tactical to strategic activities?

In most companies, financial reporting consumes an inordinate amount of time and energy. By applying the right technology in the right ways, you can eliminate much of the tedious effort that goes into producing routine reports. You can free up valuable time to shift to analysis, applying your skills and expertise toward finding and delivering business value for the organization.

What’s So Bad About the Current Way of Doing Things?

Today’s finance teams typically spend too much time creating reports against their EPM data instead of performing analysis.

One reason for this is the increasing complexity that many businesses experience as they grow. Very often, finance teams must struggle with multiple sources of data. If they don’t have access to the right data in the first place, reporting turns into a tedious back-and-forth process between finance and other departments to get information, make sure it’s the right data, and incorporate it into reports.

This undermines confidence because the organization lacks a definitive “single source of truth” for financial reports. If sales executives and financial leaders are coming up with two sets of revenue numbers that don’t match, for example, it leads to a loss in trust. C-suite executives may spend their time arguing over which number is right, rather than solving problems and moving the business forward.

Many finance teams are simply using the wrong tools. Instead of having to wrangle the data into the format they want, they should be able to analyze the numbers, focus on communication with stakeholders throughout the organization, and create clear messages around financial results and corporate strategy.

The Best Way to Work Smarter, Not Harder

For finance teams, the best way to work smarter is by transforming reporting processes. In many companies, financial reports still involve exporting data from one or more data sources, importing it into spreadsheets, formatting the resulting data, adding or updating formulas, and meticulously double-checking the results.

That’s incredibly tedious, and it’s a recurring task. Most finance teams produce reports on a monthly basis (at least), so the process of collecting, collating, and verifying the data must be repeated over and over again. Even worse, those tasks must often be repeated multiple times within a single reporting cycle. If someone makes a last-minute adjusting entry, or if a flurry of month-end transactions is posted after the fact, that means yet another round of generating the numbers, moving them into Excel, validating formulas, and checking the final results.

Errors are virtually inevitable. If your new source data contains one additional row (or one less row), than the previous set of numbers, it can render many of your Excel formulas inaccurate. If your spreadsheets are complex, with multiple references across different worksheets, then the likelihood of errors increases exponentially. Users occasionally key in manually entered data incorrectly, leading to another source of inaccuracies. Sometimes problems are even caused by a simple oversight, such as forgetting to change the dates listed above each column on the report header.

Report Automation Saves Time and Money

The secret to fast, easy, accurate financial reports lies in automation built on modern, purpose-built reporting tools with real-time links to ERP source data. With the right reporting software, you can access up-to-the-minute numbers simply by opening the report and refreshing the data.

If a new transaction was recently added to the source system, that data will automatically be reflected in the updated version of the report. There’s no copying, pasting, or meticulous double-checking.

With the right reporting software, users can easily filter the results by business unit, region, or product, simply by selecting the appropriate subset of data. They can quickly change out columns such as last year’s YTD actuals vs. last year’s budget, dollar variances, or percentages.

With automated reporting, finance teams can virtually eliminate the administrative busywork typically associated with producing monthly reports. Instead, the reporting tool serves the information up to them automatically, just the way they want it, fully updated, and 100% accurate.

Real-time links mean that a user can update any financial report at any time, regardless of how many last-minute transactions users might have added to the source system.

Report Automation Frees Up Time for Analysis

By working smarter rather than harder, finance teams have an opportunity to take on a more strategic role within their organizations. By eliminating low-value activities, they can shift their focus to analysis. That means identifying potential new business opportunities, finding ways to save the company money, analyzing potential future scenarios, and advising the C-suite on matters of strategic importance.

This is the essence of the “work smarter” philosophy. Finance professionals, by definition, have a keen ability to understand the material implications of business decisions. They do that best when they’re equipped with data, including real-world business results from the recent past, and when they have tools that enable powerful analysis and exploration of their data.

In today’s fast-paced business world, timing is also essential. Information delayed is information denied. For company executives to act quickly and respond to opportunities and threats, they need rapid access to accurate information and analysis.

Smart business leaders are learning from the uncertainties of the recent past and making sure their organizations are designed with agility in mind.

For finance teams, reporting and analysis are core capabilities; but that shouldn’t mean spending days of staff time every month producing routine reports. By automating those processes, finance professionals can elevate their function to a strategic level, using their time on high-value tasks like analysis and contributing significantly to organizational agility.

With CXO from insightsoftware, finance can finally take control of reporting. CXO makes it easy to build reports without specialized IT skills. Even the setup and installation process creates a minimal impact on IT, and it frees up the finance team from dependency on technical resources. CXO delivers immediate value out of the box, with no custom coding, and without requiring an expensive data warehouse solution. To learn more about CXO from insightsoftware, contact us for a free, no-obligation demo.