Automation of Monthly Financial Performance Reporting

This is a process for reporting the Actual vs. Forecast vs. Plan for P&L and Balance sheet items. Business units and senior management use this information to measure the actual performance of the business against planned performance.

The Challenge

Actual, Forecast and Plan data come from different sources, are produced by different teams and show different levels of granularity. For example, Actuals might come from the GL or a Data Warehouse, Forecast numbers might come from a proprietary system and the Plan might be produced on a spreadsheet stored on the shared drive.

Staff are required to collect all the files from these diverse sources, copy the data on to complex spreadsheets containing a plethora of lookups and linked formulae and roll up the data to produce management and regulatory reports. There is limited time available to check that all the numbers reconcile and that links have not been broken.

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SolveXia's Solution

SolveXia's solution is to seperate the data from the reporting.

We source, validate, map and then 'normalise' all of the data into a single table that contains Actual numbers, Forecasts and Targets for all accounts, business units and entities for all months.
We take the data from the single table and feed it into the reports - either Yellowfin or Excel.

A high level of visibility and control is maintained throughout the process by the provision of:
1) 'Workflow oriented' dashboards that display the status of the process, e.g. what proportion of the input data has been processed and is ready for use, or which business units have collected their performance reports; and
2) 'Validation' dashboards that display inconsistencies and errors in need of correction, e.g. unmapped accounts in need of review.

The Uniqueness of SolveXia

Every performance report is different; It might be the way your chart of accounts maps and rolls up, or how your organisation / entity structure influences the information that is needed.

Instead of programming black-box solutions that take months or years, SolveXia enables your Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to create customised solutions in weeks, safe in the knowledge that your configuration will perfectly emulate all mapping, data aggregation and validation tasks.

Multiple sources of data are often required; Actuals, Estimates, Forecasts, Plans - often in different formats. SolveXia enables you to collect data from any number of sources – in any format - including your GL, data warehouse, Excel spreadsheets or reporting tools (e.g. Cognos, Hyperion etc.) and store it in user defined SQL Server tables.

‍Calculations and data relationships are complex; The inherent challenge of performance reporting is in the journey of taking multiple instances of low-level, source data and mashing it all together to create a report – often including complex and error prone Excel formulae such as VLOOKUPs and SUMIFs. SolveXia enables users to select from a library of drag-and-drop steps that emulate these common mapping and data aggregation tasks with NO need for Excel formulae.

Presenting and communicating results is vital; SolveXia provides online reports and dashboards that can be used to visualise, annotate and drill through results. Alternatively, processed results can be sent back to your core databases / sources of truth for further use by the business.

Beyond producing the numbers, you need to know how you got them; The task of preparing the reporting is often left to one individual in the finance group. This introduces key person dependency and limits knowledge transfer through the organisation. Any manual method makes it difficult to clarify how a particular income or expense item has been calculated. SolveXia overcomes this difficulty by creating live and up-to-date documentation of the end-to-end business process including all inputs, outputs and every step in-between.

Ultimately, the SolveXia solution simplifies the performance reporting process by rapidly delivering accurate, validated information. Throughout the production line, you can derive comfort from the certainty that any inconsistencies are being highlighted and addressed.