Financial Reporting Software: Why You Need It

Every business needs financial reporting software. There’s no shortage of accounting solutions with financial reporting – so how do you choose the right one? To understand business performance and create effective strategies, you need a tool that helps you draw financial analysis from every angle. Let’s take a look at:

1. Why financial reporting is vital to your success.
2. What financial reporting software can do for your business.
3. The features you need to get the most out of any financial reporting solution.

Why Financial Reporting is Mission Critical

Financial reporting can answer all of the crucial questions of managing your business. The numbers don’t lie. At the end of the day, your business is powered by the finances generated from and consumed by operations. This is true for every business model, type, and industry. Understanding your business’ finances and recognizing revenue patterns is mission-critical. Software, vendors, resources, projects – all these, and more, are influencing business decisions at an accelerated rate because of our digitally connected world. Financial reporting lets you drill down into what’s causing the numbers. Financial analysis like this is powerful because you can rework strategies to transform and empower your whole organization.

Eliminate Guesswork. Build Winning Strategies

Uncertainty is bad for business growth. Stop guessing what’s driving expenses and income as this won’t properly address financial or operational issues. Financial reporting helps you build actionable plans by eliminating the uncertainties around financial performance. Knowing your exact monetary status means you can apply targeted improvements – no more wasting money and time on efforts that don’t produce results. To do this, you need detailed reports that help you identify exactly what you need to know.

Choosing Financial Reporting Software

Financial reporting software should fit your business’ specific needs. Therefore, look for a solution that is flexible and easily tailored to suit your individual business needs. Let’s take a look at the particular software features we recommend for generating the best financial reports.

Comprehensive Reports

Naturally, you’ll want accounting software that’s equipped with a strong set of financial reports out of the box. Flexibility is an important software feature because every successful company utilizes custom financial reporting. The way your data is compiled and presented is crucial.

Strong financial reporting software should let you modify rows and columns to compare and analyze finances in a way that fully addresses how you operate. In addition, the ability to add custom calculations and formats is a must-have to target specific data.This also helps maintain accuracy and helps you compare your business financials more effectively, particularly for these reports:

• Comparative of budget to actual
• Comparative of budget to budget
• Comparative of actual to actual
• Year-to-date reporting
• Month-to-date reporting
• Report on relative accounting periods

Some additional financial reports you need are:

• Profit and Loss
• Profit and Loss Versus Budget
• Balance Sheet
• Trial Balance
• Cash Flow Statement
• Ledger Inquiry

Automated Accounting

You already know all of the reports we touched on are vital and valuable. But, there is a difference between creating these reports in Excel and having them pre-populated with accurate financial data from a software solution. Developing a financial report might seem complicated, but not with an automated accounting system. In a comprehensive accounting solution, these reports are more valuable because they can be tailored to answer broad or specific questions. No longer will you need to manually input data for a profit and loss statement or pull together monthly reports for hours on end to create a year-to-date report. With a financial reporting software solution, you can set up these reports and continually run them, when you need to, with the click of a button.Manually entering and re-entering transaction details from your other apps is a pain, but it also jeopardizes your reports’ accuracy. An automated system captures and records your data instantly and populates the details correctly into the report.

Connected to Your Operations Software

To provide the high-quality reports you need, your accounting system needs to be connected with your management system. Apps that record sales, plan for projects, and even manage inventory control impact your finances. To compile accurate reports, transactions generated by other tools must flow into the accounting system. This also saves you valuable time.

Collaboration and Visibility

Financial management and decision making should be a collaborative effort. Your accounting software should enable your whole team to review or participate in the reporting process. This allows for more accurate reporting and ensures that the team can visualize the finances impacting operations, and results. Additionally, your reporting system should have functionalities to let you search for specific criteria. This saves you time looking for key financial details, users, or product info.

Invest for the Future

To guide the growth and security of your company, managing your finances is essential. Cloud-based financial reporting software is vital because you can use it to find the best strategies for your business. Whether you’re looking to reduce costs, scale operations, or take on new opportunities, insightful financial reports will help you find the info you need to achieve your goals.