How to automate monthly management reporting
12/16/2020
It has long been the case that the added value contributed by the finance department has not resided in simply processing documents: a company’s financial management hinges on budget preparation, cost and revenue analysis, and well-planned cash flow. Consolidated data from accounting and other systems are a fundamental requirement for CFOs to accomplish these tasks. However, many organizations still find obtaining financial data a major challenge that consumes significant human resources. Little time and capacity then remain to actually analyze and interpret the information, and the quality of the output suffers as a result. At the same time, transferring data and preparing reports manually increases the risk of human error, which can, in turn, lead to poor management decisions.
Despite this, a number of companies still transfer final, up-to-date information into their regular reports (monthly, quarterly, etc.) or into their annual reports by copying and pasting data from multiple Excel spreadsheets or ERP systems.
Disclosure Management makes reporting faster and minimizes the risk of errors, and you don’t have to leave the Microsoft Office environment
This attention-demanding, laborious and truly unattractive task can be replaced by an automated solution using Disclosure Management. This maps source data from financial, ERP and other systems directly into regular reports, presentations or annual reports – not just into tables but also into supporting text, explanations or comments.
- Work in the same way – you do not have to learn how to use any new tools or additional data formats; keep working in Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint).
- Work in real time – you can be certain that the data in your work-in-progress document are always the most recent: they are updated automatically when a change is made in the source. As a result, you can stop endlessly copying data to and from, while automatic checks ensure consistency throughout the entire report.
- Work as a team – reports are prepared by a number of different colleagues but, thanks to a sophisticated policy regarding access rights, process continuity and versioning, it will always be clear when and where changes were made and by whom, and you will be able to compare individual versions of the document being worked on.
- Work in line with the latest legislative requirements – have total control over the XBRL format. If your company is listed on the EU capital markets and, since the year 2020, you have had to finalize your IFRS-compliant annual statements using the updated systems for digitized business reporting (XHTML and iXBRL), Disclosure Management is a comprehensive solution. In fact, it can mark statements using the so-called XBRL tags.
- Work quickly – deploying an initial Disclosure Management solution in a company usually takes just a couple of months, while implementing advanced data connectors can be done in later phases. In our experience, business users are able to work with the solution completely independently after a two-day training course.
Preparing reports before using Disclosure Management
Preparing reports using Disclosure Management
Introduce speed, accuracy and consistency
to the laborious, error-prone and cumbersome process of regulatory, external and internal reporting.
- Cut the time spent creating internal and external narrative reports in half
- Simplify and automate the outputs of the reporting process
- Ensure that every report is based entirely on current data and represents a single version of the truth
- Gain full and auditable control over document changes and versioning
- Meet all the latest EU legislative requirements
This article written by Růžena Barešová and David Klapal was published by CFO World 4/2021.
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Růžena Barešová
Business Development Manager
