As Profit Consultants and Part Time Finance Directors, we need to keep up with latest developments so we can help our clients.

In our previous blog, we highlighted that if you are not receiving your management reporting shortly after the month end, it may indicate a process that needs improving.  If you are relying on spreadsheets for reporting rather than an expensive accounting system, this is often one of the main causes of the delay.

The basic excuses are:

Multiple data sources – You may need to extract data from your accounting system, along with budgets, stock systems, sales systems, margin reports and other sources before consolidating everything into Excel.

Live data – If files remain open or continue to change while reports are being prepared, it can create inconsistencies, particularly while trying to close the month quickly.

Data corruption – Spreadsheet errors or broken links can delay reporting.

Different month end dates- Data from different systems may not align, creating additional work.

Manual intervention

Once the data has been imported into Excel, your finance team will probably go through this routine:

– Delete rows

– Fill blanks

– Expand data for new rows

– Update Formulas

– Split columns

– Merge Columns

– Convert text to numbers

– Perform X and V Lookups a lot

– Update Pivot table

– Copy and paste Pivot table to another spreadsheet

– Found error (so go back and update all above again)

This could happen several times in a long process to get output reports.

No manual intervention

With all the new system developments to help, you should be able to have all the data files you need consolidated and produce the reports with no manual intervention.

New Tools

There are a lot of new tools to enable no manual intervention. These, among others, include:

– Power BI

– Visual Basic

– Python

– Co pilot

– AI

I always remember a story about cutting down a tree with a blunt saw. Well, if you take the time to stop and sharpen your saw, you will cut it down quicker. That is training.

The head of finance or someone in the team needs to learn some of the new tools, so they can incorporate these into the finance team and reporting.

If you need Part Time Finance advice on your systems, staff training and reporting please get in contact by phone on 01628 623444 or email [email protected].