The Ledger

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.

Read More at Strategic Finance Magazine >

The Value of Blockchain in FP&A

Blockchain has the power to challenge many of the accepted norms of global trade, finance, and supply chain management. It has the potential to streamline financial processes by integrating delivery and payment into the contract itself. Blockchain can potentially increase IT security, because of the unprecedented protection it offers against fraud and hacking. It can also potentially improve transparency by accessing accurate transaction data from across your company’s value chain.

Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >

The Future of Cost Management

“Companies that fail to keep stride with the pace of innovation and remain complacent with traditional cost management practices will undoubtedly lag behind and fall to more forward-looking competitors.”

Digital disruption and the rapidly changing technologies that drive it are increasingly becoming key factors that companies need to consider as they strive to reduce costs and improve margins. As the age of digital disruption emerges, businesses have a choice: engage new technologies and capitalize on more strategic cost management initiatives or remain hindered by outdated and ineffective models of margin improvement.

Read More at IT-Online >

Why Embrace the Big Data Warehouse?

Many enterprises are struggling with their enterprise data warehouses straining to deliver value in the era of exploding data volumes and increased demand for analytics and data across the organization. They are also embracing the age of Big Data and dealing with new types of data that the enterprise data warehouse was not built to handle. All of this data is being introduced to the enterprise at unprecedented volume and speed. This Big Data is stored in systems uniquely capable of handling them, such as data lakes or cloud object storage. The business potential inherent in all of this data is demanding to be tapped, not only to improve the efficiency and quality of existing goods and services, but also to create new offerings or business models that can accelerate an organization ahead of the competition.

Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >