Exploring Modern Reporting Trends, Part 1: All-Inclusive Insights

While accounting departments are still, and always will be, responsible for producing traditional GAAP-based financial reports, their increasingly strategic role in business growth requires next-generation reporting. That means decision-makers have come to rely on the analytical—not simply transactional—insights derived from their data. The pressure is “on” to deliver visibility into what’s driving the business forward.

That said, a growing company’s financial management system shouldn’t be the one thing holding the business back. Let’s take a closer look three trends demonstrating why a modern approach to organizational reporting is what’s needed to ensure long-term, strategy-fueled success.

1. Combining Financial and Operational Metrics

Essentially, business leaders need a 360-degree view of their business, and this perspective isn’t to be found by glancing at income statements and balance sheets. When decision-makers have access to more than transaction-oriented financial data and reports—and they can look at operational information through a more actionable lens—they can dig into performance issues that hold strategic value and open new avenues for exploration.

Intacct’s reporting and financial dashboards, for example, bring financial and operational metrics together to help unlock insights that can’t be tapped into using legacy on-premises accounting systems and spreadsheet-based reporting methods. They enable decision-makers to answer more questions, and different types of questions, that can impact better business results. These might include questions about pricing, shipments, utilization, and more.

Learn more in Is Your Business Ready for More Powerful Reporting?.

2. Getting Insights-by-Integration
   Outdated financial management systems, whether they’re paper-based or desktop software-based, inherently limit data access and sharing—and this poses problems for executives who need questions answered today. When information is siloed and scattered across different departments and entities, it’s difficult to bring it together for quick analysis. Both the regular and ad hock reporting processes are cumbersome and time-consuming, especially as the business begins introducing new technologies that bring even more data into the mix.

This explains why more companies are transitioning to strictly digital systems, particularly cloud-based financial software that’s built to integrate data from multiple, disparate sources and make it meaningful to users. With the new functionality, companies can to securely amass and comingle large amounts of valuable information—from accounting and finance, sales, and even HR—for anytime (even real-time), anywhere analysis. In fact, Intacct’s solution seamlessly integrates with an extensive list of other business systems, including SalesForce, ADP, Expensify, Paychex, Bill.com, PayPal, and QR Inventory.

3. Slicing and Dicing for Reporting Precision

Considering the C-Suite’s need for financial and non-financial data derived from multiple sources across the business, it’s easy to understand their desire to access the information in a way that makes sense! A system that collects and stores data is one thing, but making it usable on-demand is another. Looking at pages of data (i.e. row after row and column after column of numbers) is unnecessary when your financial system does the heavy lifting.

Intacct’s solution gives finance and accounting teams, along with the decision-makers they support, the ability to tag any data by dimension value. That means they can filter data to focus on a specific product, location, project, or other business driver and spot performance trends. This is helpful when comparing performance between drivers and while evaluating performance from the perspective of different stakeholders. In other words, users can run reports that are always relevant, based on the most significant data and the metrics that matter most.

Stay tuned for part 2, where we’ll take a deeper dive into report visualizations and other reporting trends that support real-time decision-making.