The Ledger

Moving Beyond Traditional Budgeting

Management accountants are always looking for a way to make their budgeting process easier. An operational budget has significant advantages over the traditional budget because it is driven by an operational income statement. An operational budget is a great demonstration of the analytics operational inadequacies of traditional accounting and it gives companies and enduring competitive edge. The limitations of the traditional budgeting process have been recognized for a long time, and many management accountants see the need for a change.

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Improve Performance with Opportunity Costs

“Clearly defining and quantifying the benefits that are given up due to suboptimal performance can be a strong incentive for making necessary improvements.”

Opportunity costing is key to connecting monetary and operational metrics and optimizing the conversion process. Opportunity cost is defined as a benefit that could have been received, but was given up to take another course of action. How does this apply to manufacturing cost performance?

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The Key Elements of a Big Data Warehouse

A Big Data warehouse is an architecture for data management and organization that utilizes both traditional data warehouse architectures and modern Big Data technologies, with the goal of driving analytics and business intelligence across the organization. The goal of the Big Data warehouse is a lot like the traditional goals of the enterprise data warehouse: delivering intelligence and analytics to decision-makers to drive business efficiency and effectiveness. There are six key elements that play a role in a Big Data warehouse architecture.

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Principles of Report Design for Every Finance Pro

Reporting can be challenging for even the most seasoned finance professional. Most issues with reporting fall into five major principles: accuracy, consistency, appearance, efficiency, and usability, with occasional overlap between them. Organizations often develop their own reporting style, but it is important that their style is compliant with the five principles. While reporting style preferences will vary and reports won’t always be perfect, greater attention to these principles should allow accounting professionals to improve the quality of reporting.

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