7 Finance Reporting Nightmares: Banish Your Fears

If financial reporting nightmares are keeping you up at night, you’re not alone. As the long hours exporting data, running reports, and fixing errors cast dark shadows over your days, take heart and get clear insights into your data with these tips. With tools and processes that save you time, you can mark yourself safe from these scary financial reporting situations.

1. The Month-End Marathon

It’s exhausting spending days or even weeks closing the books because every report requires manual data extraction, reformatting, and verification. If your finance team is working overtime every month just to produce the same reports, look for an automated solution that connects your ERP directly to Excel.

With automated reports, your team can reduce steps and errors each month. In fact, a construction company in the Southeastern United States saved up to 140 hours a month by switching to an automated reporting solution.

2. The Excel Formula Time Bomb

You may be consumed by the constant fear that this month’s reports contain a hidden error. All it would take is for one wrong cell reference in a manually built report to go unnoticed, and then your CFO would be presenting incorrect numbers to the board. Eeek!

You can avoid a disaster like that by using tools that access live data in Excel to ensure your numbers are current and that offer AI assistance for spotting errors. A private real estate development and management firm cut its reporting time in half by switching to a solution that links its property management software to Excel. With increased confidence in the data, the operations team saved steps and time previously spent reviewing common area maintenance and tax recovery calculations.

3. The IT Ticket Black Hole

You never know when that modified financial report you requested from IT is going to pop up and surprise you. Sometimes it feels like your request dropped into a black hole. Meanwhile, your leadership team wanted the data yesterday, and you’re stuck explaining why a “simple change” is taking so long.

According to insightsoftware’s Shaping the Future study, 76% of finance teams surveyed said they were overreliant on IT. You can avoid that by finding a tool that lets you create your own reports easily. No more waiting weeks (or months) for IT to get to it.

4. The Multi-System Data Nightmare

For enterprise financial reporting, you may be juggling data exports from multiple ERPs, spreadsheets, and systems, then manually reconciling everything. Aligning different data structures, formats, and timing can create a patchwork of uncertainty.

Don’t let the suspense of getting clear month-end financial reports from complex, varied data sources stress you out. A large automotive services company was able to get insights into end-to-end business performance by connecting its cloud environment to Excel reporting.

5. The BI Tool That Doesn’t Speak Finance

Don’t remain on edge fighting with a business intelligence platform designed for sales dashboards that doesn’t understand your multi-dimensional financial data. You shouldn’t have to spend hours trying to re-create what should be a straightforward profit-and-loss report.

Instead, your finance team can use a tool that lets you build the custom reports you need while automatically pulling from your ERP data and connecting to Excel. An Australian construction company was able to create better reports for management and customers using a connected spreadsheet solution, and even identified an area for business expansion based on accessible BI reports.

6. The Audit Trail Disaster

When your report’s done, that’s not the end of the story. You’ve got to be ready to drill down into your data when auditors want the source of a number from last quarter’s report. Unfortunately, manual exports leave no breadcrumbs. Tracking down source data makes more manual work for you.

Because healthcare organizations have to be ready to answer regulatory auditors’ questions, they need to have confidence in their data. A family home care provider in the US Pacific Northwest built greater trust in its financial reporting after implementing a system that could pull all its data together automatically and end manual reporting. Now its financial reporting can scale up with the business.

7. The Knowledge Silo Problem

It’s scary when your financial reporting processes are so complex and manual that only one person knows how to build the critical monthly reports. You can feel the panic building if they’re out sick, on vacation, or (worse) planning to leave the company. Who’s got the time to pick up the slack?

With a tool that allows finance to easily create custom reports as your business needs change, you’ve got a strong team that can weather turnover, illness, and economic uncertainty. As our Shaping the Future study indicates, finance teams have to be ready to contribute to strategic decisions amid a turbulent economic climate. Quick and flexible reporting capability is key.

No matter which of these seven types of problems terrifies you the most, it should ease your mind to know that there’s a solution that will end the drama. Spreadsheet Server from insightsoftware lets you connect your ERP’s financial data structures to Excel for the sophisticated financial reports you need. With AI assistance built in, you can get answers to unexpected questions without a lot of manual digging and frustrating overtime.

So banish your reporting nightmares, stop the long hours spent on manual tasks, and let Spreadsheet Server free up time for a dreamy holiday vacation. Think about what you could do with the time you get back.

For more ideas on how to solve your financial reporting challenges, save time, and drive strategic impact, watch our webinar.

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