7 Great Qualities in a Reporting System

Freeing up finance to conduct valuable analysis

At the end of each reporting period, the finance team is tasked with creating several reports. For many finance departments, this process is time-consuming and tedious. Without the tools to automate report creation and distribution, the Office of Finance is consistently limited in their analytic capabilities.

For many, the goal is to implement a reporting solution that will deliver analysis tools to the hands of the report consumer, freeing up finance to conduct valuable analysis. When preparing your quarter-end analysis and selecting a reporting system, there are seven helpful things to consider:

1. Prepare your financial and management reporting for review
   The first step in the reporting process and ultimately, in selecting a reporting system, is to prepare your financial and management reports for review. A user-friendly reporting solution will allow you to create reports that multiple departments can utilize by consolidating data from multiple systems.
2. Manage distribution of your reports to key stakeholders
   An additional challenge to report creation is report distribution. A comprehensive reporting system can handle this automatically by creating a security hierarchy that determines the required information on reports for specific users.
3. Tools and tips to analyze your reports in a timely fashion
   When selecting a reporting system, you should also ensure it has OLAP-based reporting capabilities and drill-through functions. This will allow department heads to analyze reports on their own, without having to involve finance.
4. Analyze the impact of your quarterly performance
   Next, conduct variance and trend analysis, which allows users to investigate beyond initial reported numbers and analyze quarterly performance. A reporting system should possess variance functionality to perform analysis against plan and scenarios.
5. Prepare multiple forecast scenarios
   When creating these forward-looking projections, your solution should also support a versioning and re-planning capability at all phases in the reporting and analysis cycle.
6. Distribute forecast and finalize for approval
   Once you have completed your forecast, you will need to distribute and finalize it for approval using your system’s automated report distribution capabilities with security applied.
7. Track ongoing results using scorecards and dashboards
   And finally, your CPM software should allow your finance department to visually track ongoing results using visual scorecards and dashboards.

To learn more about Prophix’s analysis capabilities, visit our website.