CFO Insights: Revolutionizing Reporting in the Digital Age

“Real-time reporting will arrive when all aspects of the reporting process become automated and streamlined. The big barriers today are data quality and latency. Fortunately, the future of reporting holds real promise for companies that want to take advantage of it. Automation helps simplify and streamline data management because data used in reporting is no longer prepared for analysis manually. The software does that work.”

Read More at Deloitte >

CFO Magazine: Best Organizations Report Consolidated Financials in 4 Days: Metric of the Month

“Excessive spreadsheet use, manual touchpoints in the process, and human error all increase cycle times for completing monthly consolidated financials.”

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CFO Journal: Modernized Reporting for a Rapidly Changing World

“Connected, integrated reporting can provide many benefits to organizations by helping produce consistent, high-quality data through a streamlined process to enable improved business decisions. This reporting model can shift an organization’s focus away from collecting and reconciling data toward exceptions or anomalies that warrant scrutiny.”

Read More at The Wall Street Journal >

CFO Journal: It’s Time for a Controllership Reboot

“The pandemic brought with it an unpredictable global environment and uncertain future. This decreased the value of historical financial reporting while increasing the need for real-time reporting, including data analysis, and predictive forecasting. Finding new ways to leverage real-time data and new forecast models, controllership could manage against multiple views and plausible scenarios to remain agile and resilient against an unpredictable future.”

Read More at The Wall Street Journal >

SF Magazine: After a Year of COVID

What are your business’ drivers?

How frequently are you measuring the potential impact that external drivers, like inventory constraints and labor disruption, will have?

““We’re increasing the frequency of discussing and evaluating our strategy and goals,” Grinwis said. “Each month we do pulse checks to evaluate if changes are needed to our planning based on a number of drivers, including the overall macro environment—COVID-related shutdowns, competitor trends, market demand—as well as company-specific challenges—inventory constraints, labor disruption.”

We suggest you to navigate here the four common types of remote workers and how to support them.

The pandemic has made it very clear that yearly or quarterly reporting won’t cut it. Planful embraced a continuous-planning approach that allows the finance team to be more agile and adaptable.”

Read More at SF Magazine >

“As CFOs face the demands of year-end accounting and financial reporting, they’re pondering which issues need to be front and center and how to frame them.”

Here are the 4 issues that CFO’s need to think about:

1. Forecasting and related impairment analyses
2. Going concern analysis
3. Internal controls
4. Stakeholder communications

Gaining Actionable Business Insights Through Continuous KPI Reporting

As organizations continue to put greater emphasis on facts-based decision making, ensuring relevant measures and timely access to data becomes increasingly important. Often organizations will pinpoint a handful of key performance indicators (KPIs) to gauge the organization’s operational performance. The reporting structure for these KPIs is critical in allowing decision makers to the pulse of their business by identifying performance issues and drill-down to identify opportunities for improvement. Best-practice manufacturing organizations understand that consistently tracking operational and financial KPIs directly related to profitability and productivity are key in gaining actionable and accurate insights into their business.

Read More at Industry Week >

Dynamic Reporting: The Quest to a Single Version of the Truth

Reports are used to “take the pulse of the business” and offer insights into the organization’s health. Having a clear perspective of the company’s key drivers is critical for businesses to remain competitive and profitable. Major efforts are underway enterprise-wide as organizations harness the power of their data to drive better, faster decision making. As these companies work to expedite the decision making process, they must first focus on achieving a single source of the truth. Without that step, there can be no confidence in the accuracy of data and in the outcome of the decision. As CFOs seek to take full advantage of the data available to their organizations – and then deliver actionable insights based on that data – they should consider a new approach to reporting.

CFO Research surveyed finance leaders on their reporting practices and found that while 85% of CFOs claim to have direct access to the data they need, they often spend too much time gathering and formatting the data so it can be easily digested by those outside of the finance department. This leaves a miniscule 15% of their time available for any valuable analysis needed to guide both strategic and tactical decisions.

Another challenge with reporting is the increase of the volume of data available for reporting, leading to an increase in reports needed to review the results. The growing number of reports also significantly increases the risk for inefficiency and inaccuracy in the reported results. The research also found that 43% of CFOs consider their reporting processes to be inefficient, and they identify the key obstacle that stands in the way of gaining actionable insights is lack of source system integration. 60% say that disparate systems continue to house operational and financial data separately, and that means their teams continue to be overwhelmed with error-prone and time-consuming process of having to manually aggregate data.

Much of the value in reporting comes from ensuring the right pieces of data are pulled together to provide clarity on the direction of the business. Continuing to rely on traditional reporting platforms will only magnify the shortcomings in the reporting process and can be that one missing piece that stands in the way of gaining insight.

An important first step to faster, more accurate reporting is to evaluate non-value-added tasks like data gathering, verification and formatting. As more and more organizations see value in tracking non-financial metrics, corporate reports naturally must include a growing amount of operational data. Using traditional reporting methods, finance must access data from other parts of the business – housed in systems outside of finance – and then manually manipulate and reconcile the data into a consolidated report.

Finance teams strive to produce corporate performance reports for multiple audiences, but it’s often a very complex process due to the number of disparate systems that contain relevant information. 54% of CFOs admitted they generate reports by exporting data out of their ERP systems and into a Microsoft office application such as Excel, Word, and Powerpoint. Of those that report an inefficient process, 64% take this approach. Alternatively, over one-fifth of CFOs generate reports directly out of their ERP systems, and 41% of that group still say they found their numbers inconsistent from report to report. Spreadsheets are identified as a key source for errors and inefficiency, while disparate ERP systems between locations is identified as a primary cause of problems in reporting.

The lack of centralized reporting system introduces inconsistencies in metrics, data, and calculations, subsequently leading to inconsistencies in reports. To confirm the accuracy of their reports, finance teams must spend an excessive amount of time verifying and validating data. This process limits the ability to easily conduct variance and comparative reporting, which is a critical step that can help determine what areas  require a possible course correction.

By automating report generation and working from a single source of the truth, finance can deliver the quality and timely reports. CFOs who can streamline this process for their teams can instill a greater level of trust in the data, while enabling the finance team to reveal insights during the reporting process.

To truly deliver actionable insights among non-financial managers, CFOs will also need to institute processes that ensure multiple, fast visual views of a growing amount of both finance and operational data. Working from a single version of the truth could be the missing piece to gaining advanced insight into the direction of your business.

Fully-Verfied offers a host of reporting and data visualization options to view and share model data that eliminates manual data gathering. Ad hoc charts and graphs and available at every level of detail and standard reporting tools are integrated to build formal reports. The Microsoft Excel® Add-in makes it easy to export and import model data and built-in dashboard designer gives you the tools to expose top-line results with drill-down capabilities for more detailed root cause analysis.

Our platform provides businesses with a single source of the truth by integrating with existing systems – ERP, Finance, Operations, Business Intelligence, Data Warehouses and others – ImpactECS models handle all of your cost and profitability analytics and planning processes in a single environment and promotes collaboration.

Click Here to learn more about how ImpactECS allows business leaders and to understand the story their data is telling them with one version of the truth that doesn’t keep them guessing.

Improving the Relevance and Value of Financial Reporting

“How can CFOs and finance organizations improve the relevance and value of financial reporting? Like the competitive life cycle of a firm or product, financial reporting and accounting are at a crossroads: decline or resurgence. Significant forces of change during the last four decades have radically altered the way companies create long-term value. Yet financial reporting and accounting haven’t changed markedly and even have moved in the wrong direction in some cases.” The first step in regaining relevance in financial reporting is for all of us to recognize a problem exists. CFOs and management accountants have an opportunity to experiment and develop internal performance reports focused on the components of the Strategic Resources & Consequences Report that create sustained competitive advantage.

Read More at Strategic Finance Magazine >

What Story is Your Performance Reporting Telling You?

Today reporting is used to quickly give companies a true picture of where they are, why they’re there, and how they can get where they want to be. Most businesses now have access to scores of variables that can help them determine the likelihood of success. They track a multitude of separate data streams from disparate sources that generate countless spreadsheets and reports. Why? Because business leaders know the true story of their business is in the numbers. Unfortunately, finding that story can be a time-consuming, painstaking process. The business world’s growing reliance on data and analytics to uncover the true story of a company’s performance mirrors the increasing interest and utilization of CBD (cannabidiol) or CBD flower in various industries. Just as data can reveal valuable insights, CBD, known for its potential wellness benefits, is being explored for its role in promoting well-being and finding a healthier, more balanced narrative for individuals seeking natural alternatives. Both data-driven decision-making and the wellness potential of CBD represent evolving landscapes where discovery can be transformative but may require careful exploration and analysis.

Read More at Strategic Finance Magazine >