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Data plays a key role in supporting industries globally. By now, we are all acutely aware of its ability to inform decisions within enterprises, and how critical it is to better serve customers and partners. We also know that it takes more than just data to drive decision-making. For data to be a constructive and actionable resource, it needs to be digestible and insightful.
Powered by enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, operational reporting should be the means to help translate and visualise data from numbers on a screen to insightful observations, allowing business and finance leaders to uncover trends that inform strategic decisions. But despite the scope of possibility, operational reporting is still a pain-point that finance leaders are struggling to address.
While it plays an undeniable role in supporting business intelligence and financial analysis, operational reporting tools are not up to scratch. New data from insightsoftware and Hanover Research illustrates this claim. From our survey of 500 decision makers across EMEA and the US, respondents identify three major concerns: the time that it takes to create reports (46 per cent), the complexity of the tools (47 per cent), and an inability to deep-dive into transactional data for comprehensive detail (28 per cent).
If data is only as useful as its interpretation, then operational reporting is the key that unlock it. The question, then, is not when you address it, but how?
Productivity is paramount
Digital transformation is touted as the key to raising productivity, increasing efficiency gains and yielding the most value from your time. This is especially applicable to the finance function.
Currently, finance teams must create operational reports to track things such as productivity through expenditure or performance against budgets and profits. Astonishingly, despite the increasing amount of technology on-hand to support these processes, 76 per cent of operational reporting currently occurs in Excel – a process that relies heavily on manual creation. This leaves room for significant ineptitude when dissecting and disseminating information.
Moreover, the survey unveiled that half of decision-makers take a maximum of four hours to generate reports, but depending on the type of report, 14 per cent to 24 per cent of decision-makers can take five to eight hours for this type of work. Changing reporting processes from a natively managed IT service to a web-based ERP software-as-a-service (SaaS) model eliminates many of these challenges. Instead of running behind reporting deadlines and struggling to meet efficiency gains, automation becomes an accessible tool, drastically minimising the time spent generating reports.
It’s all in the presentation
Aside from constraints on time, using Excel or even native ERP reports and dashboards rarely covers the needs of finance in relation to operational reporting. These tools are often inflexible or static in nature, which can make it difficult to unearth the right findings that are vital to business operations.
Typically, these tools are handy when aggregating other business platforms but lack the dynamism required to understand the data and provide useful context. Our survey also found that fewer than a quarter of finance decision-makers are creating reports that are all (or mostly) interactive.
Further, this approach requires the technical knowledge of accounting colleagues to both implement and understand the findings. This runs the risk of isolating non-finance staff across other business units from interacting with, and gleaning information, from these reports.
The presentation of information can be the difference between efficiency gains and inadequacy. Adopting solutions that present operational data in an intuitive way opens a multitude of opportunities. It supports better collaboration of non-finance departments for greater visibility and quick answers, and removes the need for deep technical expertise. Within finance, intuitive interactivity means access to comprehensive contextual information aggregated from data – in real time. This not only saves time, it improves accuracy by eliminating 80 per cent of manual processes.
If not now, when?
According to Deloitte’s 2025 finance predictions, “finance is entering the golden age of technology”. As businesses struggle to climb back on the horse in an ongoing pandemic, using technology to reduce complexity and cost is a no-brainer.
Operational reporting is both important and unavoidable for finance teams, and with the evolution of environment, social, and corporate governance (ESG), the demand for it is only set to increase. While it would be unrealistic to expect the number of reports to decrease, finance teams can certainly use the power of the cloud to make this process as seamless as possible, creating reports without the need for an IT overhaul. In this way, we can do away with manual, error-ridden spreadsheets in Excel and truly take business operations to the next level.
Originally published on Business Reporter
