An Excel file weighing in at 6.5Mb was emailed (Yes, emailed) with the current financial statements. It contained six worksheets just to support creating the statements.
Unfortunately, this is a common occurrence. Naturally, we do the best we can with the knowledge we have, but at what point does one say to themselves: “There has to be a better way?” Excel is an excellent tool, but is it the right tool for the job you are doing?
Automate Financial Statements
A common thing we do at Flexxus is to make creating financial statements faster and easier, and ultimately more accurate. We are eliminating the vlookup and sumif formulas and leveraging the ERP system to stop doing this mundane work that adds little value.
Financial statements are typically driven by individual GL accounts. Yes, accounts are important but financial statements break as soon as you add one new GL account. That’s why we recommend using account groups instead to drive your financial statements. This way, when you add new GL accounts your statements don’t break. Your reports update themselves and always reflect new accounts. How bad can that be?
Use account groups to drive your financial statements. This way, when you add new GL accounts your statements don’t break and reports update themselves.
Leverage Your ERP Software
Next, leverage your ERP’s financial reporting tool to make generating these reports quick, easy and accurate. If your ERP system doesn’t have a financial reporting tool there are lots of them on the market that should be able to work with it. Buy one, it’s worth it!
At the end of the process (now much quicker too), you have financial statements for the whole company as well as for each department. These statements can be generated on demand and are available in less than 10 minutes.
That means that not only can you provide any time updates to your managers but you also don’t need to keep a copy of every statement you create. It’s time to stop saving to disk each financial statement you create. If you don’t trust your financial statement creation process or your ERP software to re create those reports, why not? What is wrong?
Add Value!
When you automate your financial statements and leverage your ERP software you can spend more time doing intelligent things such as analysing the reports and providing advice. This is where you create real value!
Your ERP software is your system of record. Leverage it to produce any recurring report from it at will with confidence that it is both accurate and current. If you are not doing this today, it’s time to make some changes.
