How To Improve Your Year-End Reports – The Easy Way
It’s that time of year again when you must generate those valuable reports your manager and company rely so heavily upon. We hope this reporting season went smoothly for you, but we all know that none of us are perfect and there are always ways in which we can improve.
Finance and sales departments face the same challenges at the end of every reporting period, whether it’s month-end, quarter-end, or year-end. The departments must prepare financial reports and statements such as balance sheets, cash flow statements, income statements, management reports, and provide analysis of key performance indicators.
During the reporting period, most managers want specific information about their product line, region, division, or stacks of data points throughout the organization. The more data required, the longer these tasks take. Fortunately, the revolution of analyzing data has come upon us, thanks to the availability of powerful tools in today’s digital market. Analysis can now fall in the hands of each user instead of relying on a technical genius or a financial guru to come up with fancy integration and complex formula management.
For instance, Commercient offers a two-way SYNC app designed to integrate both your ERP and CRM data together, creating one master system for easy data access. Most organizations spend too much gathering the data to prepare reports. In today’s competitive business landscape, companies need to move beyond simply reporting; they need to analyze the data in the reports and adjust strategies based on results. Using Commercient SYNC can help businesses move beyond reporting and spend more time on the analysis of your key performance indicators.
Preparing your financial and management reporting for analysis – A data consolidation process is required. This can often be a complicated process—especially if there are multiple entities, currencies, or legacy systems. There are many software systems in most organizations— different ones for Personnel, Operations, Sales and Marketing, Services, and even Finance. Utilizing tools like Commercient SYNC makes the data avaliable for all departments with a simple click.
Distribution of reports to key stakeholders – Challenges may arise in the process of delivering reports and statements. Often there are different report requirements from different entities. Or maybe there are security issues that do not permit everyone to see the same reports. Multiple reports are required to deliver the same information to different levels of the organization. With a “reporting system” as opposed to a report, the Commercient SYNC integration solution handles this automatically. The application allows you to create a security hierarchy that automatically determines the required information on reports for specific users.
Perform variance analysis against plans and scenarios – During the planning phase, the finance and sales department can create multiple forecasts or plans based on different assumptions. As the results are reported, one can easily create a variance report to see which hypothesis was correct. Which in fact reinforces the methodology used to create the scenario associated with the presumption. Taking it a step further, the application supports re-planning capability at any phase in the reporting and analysis cycle.
Distribute re-forecasted plan and finalize approval – Once a new plan has been established, the system will distribute the new procedure the same way reports are distributed. The specific components of the plan should be distributed to the appropriate person, with security intact. Commercient SYNC will store the procedure centrally, allowing report consumers to compare actuals, a version that is secured and stored in one place. Others may distribute the new plan to all users allowing them to compare their data locally. This makes it easy for all users to access the same data at any time and from anywhere. It also means you don’t have to pay for any additional hardware such as on-premise servers or worry about data management and storage.
Track ongoing results – KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are performance metrics that measure specific goals for businesses across all sectors. Essentially, all organizations regardless of size generate data in their day to day operations. This data is then used to fuel KPI’s that have been created to measure performance against strategic goals for the business. The data is also used for the day to day management of the business, such as manufacturing-focused performance data or individual performance metrics.
With Commercient SYNC, the finance and sales teams have much more data visibility making it easier to track KPI’s and stay up to date with changes made in the CRM and ERP system simultaneously.
Would you like to improve your reporting system and eliminate manual processes? Contact us today and ask us how we will be delighted to take you on an integration journey.
