Modernise Your Financial Reporting with Close-to-Disclose Software from Fluence Technologies
CONSOLIDATION AND STATUTORY REPORTING
Finance teams face constant pressure to improve the monthly close process. But financial reporting is not just about speed. There is also a demand for better accuracy and transparency of financial data. Regulatory bodies continue to introduce new standards and accounting rules. And yet many finance organisations find they are being asked to cope with all this alongside headcounts that have been reduced in order to meet economic pressure.
The financial close, consolidate and report cycle – often referred to as record to report, or R2R – is a series of steps that can be summarised as:
- The collection of data from operational systems
- Consolidation and all that entails – reconciliations, eliminations, currency translation, journals
- Report, both internally and externally
Many companies still rely on suites of complex interlinked spreadsheets to produce their consolidated financial reports, leading to a lack of formal controls or auditability. Such a process is time-consuming, manually intensive, and error-prone.
On the other hand, using the right financial reporting software can increase finance team productivity, accelerating the close, giving confidence in the numbers, and freeing up valuable finance resource for the data analysis that is essential to support better business decisions.
FINANCIAL AND NARRATIVE REPORTING
The "Final Mile" of financial reporting is a term popularised by analysts to describe the processes and activities that are undertaken between financial consolidation and the presentation and disclosure of the results to internal and external stakeholders and regulators. Typically it combines formal financial reporting with other data such as narrative and supplementary documents managed in MS Word, PowerPoint and Excel.The Final Mile tends to involve numerous personnel as reports are collated, narrative added and final approval given. Reports are generated and distributed in a variety of formats, and sliced up according to the recipients' area of responsibility. Regulatory reports may be generated as iXBRL, from the same report sources. This is inevitably a time-consuming process and one in which there is a real risk of inconsistency creeping in.
By introducing a formal financial reporting software tool to support the Final Mile, businesses can increase finance team productivity, accelerate the close, and have absolute confidence in the reports.
