Four challenges in financial reporting – and how to solve them

A traditional reporting process in Excel is not without its challenges. In this article, we take a closer look at four of the most common issues that can prevent your company from producing accurate and timely financial reports. But how can you overcome them? We also share our suggestions.   

Creating timely, consolidated and easy-to-understand reports does not have to be a painful experience for FP&A teams. On the contrary. However, many companies settle for a reporting process that is far from reaching its full potential. The main reason often lies in the perception that process improvements are too difficult and take too long to implement.

If you work with reporting, you probably know that the term 'reporting' covers a wide range of activities. From presenting leaders with how actual figures compare to the budget, to showing how changes impact margins.

When the technological support for reporting is deprioritized, it becomes challenging to run the business based on accurate and timely financial reports.

So, consider this: Is your financial reporting as good as it can be? 

Let us take a closer look at four common challenges that can affect financial reporting when it lives in Excel ‒ and how a solution might look. 

In Finance, you and your colleagues are responsible for generating clear and actionable financial data. When presenting data to decision-makers in the company, the focus should not only be on understanding the analysis behind the data but also on which actions should be considered based on the analysis.

More and more companies are increasingly incorporating operational data, sourced from outside the finance department, into their reporting ‒ non-financial data, in other words. The use of traditional reporting methods, which are often found outside the finance department, adds an extra burden that can hinder the presentation of necessary insights.  

Financial reporting should not be an exclusive task for the Finance team but rather a collaborative process where financial and non-financial leaders work together ‒ not only to report the numbers but also to actively use them to drive business actions.

However, all too often, we see that operational managers responsible for business areas lack sufficient input or engagement in the financial planning process. They are not informed about how their decisions can impact overall profitability. This is where outdated reporting tools fall short, as they often fail to provide real performance insights that can support leaders in improving outcomes ‒ and therefore do not enable cross-functional collaboration.

The solution to the above reporting challenges does not come with a magic wand but requires a system that is more sophisticated than a spreadsheet ‒ yet not so complex that it takes six months to implement. A Workday Adaptive Planning solution can often be implemented within 4-6 weeks, depending on the level of ambition and decision-making efficiency.

The solution you choose should deliver financial intelligence at a level that both improves business performance and accelerates growth. Most importantly, it should reduce the time from “books closed” to reports ready for analysis and review to almost no time, allowing you to focus on value-adding analyses and discussions. As mentioned in the previous section, these discussions require data to be presented flexibly and tailored to the individual stakeholders in the business.

CFOs and finance teams that automate data collection and upgrade financial planning can build greater trust in the data while making it easier to gain valuable insights.