Group reporting: how the right consolidation solution can speed up your business

Many mid-sized companies still rely on manual activities like data entry, data transformation and reporting for their consolidation process. As a result, month-end closing remains a time-consuming and labor-intensive task leading to operational inefficiencies, decision-making bottlenecks, and decreased competitiveness. In this blog post Jacco Boonzaaijer and Lefteris Pagidas, both Consultants at cpmview, explain how the right consolidation solution can accelerate your group reporting process and speed up your business.

Signs that your company needs a solution for group reporting

As your organization grows, your consolidation process becomes more and more complex. Sure, you have some nice ERP tools to manage your daily business, like SAP S/4HANA. But you still rely on manual data entry when it comes to group reporting and consolidation. Sooner or later, you will reach a point when your usual way of working becomes impractical and arduous. And the need for a more advanced consolidation solution is born. You can tell by the signs in your organization if you are ready for a group reporting and consolidation solution.

What are the signs that your company needs a group reporting solution?

1. Poor data quality: manual data entry and long data loads from several sources are prone to errors, leading to inaccurate and inconsistent data. Poor data quality means incorrect or useless insights, flawed decision-making, and compromised business performance.
2. Collaboration and communication issues: the more manual work is required on the consolidation and reporting processes, the bigger the contribution of various people. Limited workflows or collaborative features may result in miscommunication, version control issues, and other consolidation and group reporting difficulties.
3. Time-consuming and labour-intensive reporting processes: your employees spend significant time gathering, reconciling, and formatting data from multiple sources. This diverts resources from more strategic activities, thus negatively impacting your overall productivity and slowing down the closing of your books.
4. Limited data analysis and insights: profound data analysis and insights are vital to stay competitive and adapt to changing market dynamics. A lack of sophisticated ways to visualize and analyze data makes it hard – or even impossible – to derive meaningful insights from your data, identify trends, and make informed decisions.
5. Compliance and audit issues: complying with regulatory requirements and periodic audits can become challenging without a group reporting and consolidation solution. You may struggle to maintain accurate records, ensure data integrity, and submit timely reports to regulatory bodies. Moreover, you risk penalties, legal issues, and reputational damage.
6. Missed growth opportunities: effective group reporting on top of the consolidation process is crucial for identifying growth opportunities, monitoring KPIs, and taking strategic decisions. You surely don’t want to miss out on valuable insights and emerging trends or lack the agility to respond to market changes effectively, do you?

How the right group reporting solution can speed up your business

A carefully selected and well-implemented consolidation and reporting solution is a real gem for accelerating your business and increasing its profitability. It contributes to your organization’s growth, facilitates working more efficiently and helps you comply with regulatory standards. How?

1. Improve your data quality: dealing with large volumes of data from various sources can be complex. A consolidation solution enables automatic data collection, aggregation, formatting, and mapping. So bye bye human errors and spending great amounts of time on data entry and manual reconciliation. And hello accurate and consistent data!
2. Streamline in-business collaboration and communication: good collaboration and communication among people involved in month-end activities are crucial for effective decision-making in mid-sized organizations. The right consolidation and reporting solution can facilitate this by, for example, allowing multiple team members to access and contribute to the process simultaneously. Furthermore, people with access to the consolidation and reporting process can easily check the status of certain tasks and communicate in a user-friendly environment.
3. Increase the efficiency (and speed!) of your consolidation and reporting process: a consolidation solution automates your group reporting process, saving valuable time and allowing employees to focus on more strategic tasks. It also provides pre-built material and reporting templates, enabling quick report generation and analysis and fast and simple closing of your books.
4. Enhance data visualizations and insights: valuable insights are gained best if the data are visually appealing and understandable. Intuitive visualization options in a (group) reporting solution, such as charts, graphs, and interactive dashboards, allow you to identify trends and make data-driven decisions.
5. Facilitate regulatory compliance and auditing: accurate and timely group reporting is mandatory to meet your regulatory compliance requirements. A consolidation solution simplifies generating compliant reports and ensures data integrity during internal and external audits.

Speed up your business too? Cpmview can help!

Amazed at what the right consolidation and reporting solution can do for your company? In our next blog post, we will explore how SAP S/4HANA and SAP Group Reporting can reinforce each other. And what the advantages are of using these sibling solutions together.

But even if your company does not use SAP S/4HANA, cpmview will be happy to assist you in finding the proper consolidation and reporting solution. Want to know more? Please do not hesitate to contact us.