The Nuts & Bolts of Dynamic Financial Reporting Software

What is dynamic financial reporting?

Real-time visibility into an organization’s financial health. It empowers users to easily create custom reports, providing the insights they need to make the very best decisions about their business.

What does it do?

A dynamic financial reporting software tool, also known as ad-hoc analytics or self-service reporting:

• Connects directly to a company’s data source(s) – whether that be multiple ERPs, spreadsheets, or any other data points.
• Gives users the ability to easily create the reports they need on-demand with any dates, departments, and line items.
• Enables non-technical users to create, edit and share reports, providing greater financial data insights to key-decision makers.
• Provides complete drill-down functionality into the details of every number, allowing users to see the story behind each balance all the way to the transactional level.
• Automatically schedules & delivers reports.

How is it different from the static reporting most companies employ?

Static reports capture the data at the time the report was created. Whereas, dynamic reporting allows you to create reports on the live data that is happening in the moment.

What are the benefits?

• Allows users to quickly and easily interact with all of their data in meaningful ways. And no matter from where they are working.
• Expedites analysis of a company’s data in real-time to be able to make strategic changes on the fly.
• Empowers users to create the critical reports they need when they need them. And have them displayed in multiple different ways.
• Analysis of the details behind each balance. This type of information provides actionable data for decision-makers.
• Saves time & money.
• Discover trends, compare budgets to actuals, generate unlimited what-if scenarios, and simplify forecasting.
• Reveal opportunities for cost savings.
• Focus on what’s most profitable, reduce risk, understand contribution/margin of revenue sources.
• Faster metrics with picture-perfect snapshots (dashboards, graphs, etc.) into your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
• Single source of truth – Eliminates human error as the data is coming directly from the enterprise accounting system (the database), rather than being manually input, for example, into spreadsheets. *See our article “The Insiders Guide to Spreadsheet Limitiations“.
• Distribution of reports can be scheduled and automated.
• Streamlines communication between teams and departments within each and every balance.
• Simplifies consolidations and eliminations.
• Easily allows changes without having to recreate reports.
• Cost of information goes down.
• Controlled access, but also unlimited, if desired.

What are the costs?

• The software itself.
• Employee training.
• Annual maintenance.

However, costs get next to zero over time as information is easily available and users are provided with the ability to make better decisions for their organization. Typically, it takes businesses weeks to create their month-end financials. With a dynamic financial reporting tool, once their report templates are created, with a few simple mouse clicks, they have the updated data they need to close their books…in a matter of minutes. There’s a huge cost when companies don’t have access to their financial data. Making the wrong decision based on bad data, or no data at all, can be death to a business. Especially in uncertain economic times like today. In our next blog, we’ll focus on why dynamic financial reporting is relevant in an economic downturn.