How to improve your financial reporting process

Many organisations want to improve their financial reporting but struggle with fragmented data, manual work, and increasing reporting pressure. Quick fixes no longer solve these core issues. Therefore, a central, reliable system that streamlines reporting is needed to support better decision-making. That is where a CPM solution becomes relevant.

In our previous blogs, we highlighted the challenges organisations face in their financial budgeting and forecasting, consolidation and reporting processes. These challenges affect both mid-sized and large companies and are often driven by an increasingly complex business environment, including: 

• External factors: regulators, competition, prices and macroeconomic developments. 
• Internal factors: acquisitions, growth, more systems, more integrations, and different definitions. 
• Siloed ways of working: as organisations grow, teams share less information, leading to fragmented insights and weaker decision‑making. 

Frequently used coping strategies

To cope with the challenges in their financial reporting process, most companies tend to use one or more of the following strategies:

1. Hire more people, work more hours and/or raise productivity targets

Higher demands on the reporting side are often solved by working harder, hiring more people, and focusing more on data delivery than on data analysis. Although this might get the job done, it severely impacts job satisfaction and the attractiveness of a company for future employees.

2. Centralising and updating ERP systems

As a good and important step in making their financial processes more efficient, many organisations invest in centralising and updating their ERP systems. This creates a solid base for efficient documentation and reporting of financial figures.

3. Centralising and integrating accounting and reporting processes

A bigger step towards a more advanced financial reporting process is centralising and integrating accounting and reporting processes. For example, by implementing shared service centres organisation-wide. This increases the efficiency of financial operations, especially in a multinational context.

4. Investing in data warehouses and BI tools

Combining data warehouses and BI tools – for example, Azure Data Lake connected with PowerBI – creates more analysis possibilities. Moreover, the analysis process becomes faster and easier because of the structured data and reports.

Still, some pain points remain

Without a doubt, each of these strategies helps enhance your financial operations, create more accurate reports and enable better analysis of your financial and operational KPIs. However, despite all the time, effort and money spent, these solutions only solve part of the problem. Both on the input and output side, it still takes a lot of manual work to get all financial data into the systems and generate the required management reports. The following pain points often remain:

• Most planning, forecasting and reporting tasks will have to be done manually in Excel-based solutions.
• This makes the financial consolidation and reporting process complex and inefficient for large and international organisations (more than 25 entities worldwide).
• There is no stable and structured way for reporting acquisitions and companies that are not included in your central processes. Acquiring companies and embedding them into your organisation remain time-consuming activities.
• A full workflow and audit trail of the main reporting processes are not available, although these are mandatory to meet audit requirements. Analysing numbers and variances from a business control perspective is a time-consuming challenge.

The added value of a CPM solution

For smooth and smart financial reporting, the ideal solution is one central system where actuals, budgets, and forecasts come together, where variance analyses can be performed, and where all core corporate performance management (CPM) activities are integrated. As part of the broader Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) landscape, a CPM solution helps finance teams move beyond isolated tools and spreadsheets and towards a more connected, strategic way of working. 

A CPM solution is worth considering if your organisation is operating in an increasingly complex and competitive environment and you take performance management seriously, not just for reporting, but for steering your business with reliable insights.

What is next?

In our next blog, “Why a modern CPM solution is a must‑have”, we explain why organisations can no longer rely on outdated tools and fragmented processes. Six key challenges are highlighted, ranging from unreliable data to rising reporting complexity, and show how a modern CPM solution helps overcome these issues. This provides a clear foundation for understanding why upgrading your CPM landscape is essential for future growth.