An accounts department is one of the most important departments within a company. If this department runs smoothly, then invoices get issued on time, credit notes are issued when needed, purchases are paid for promptly, and records are kept accurately. However, if this isn’t the case, then your company’s reputation can be drastically damaged and your productivity may be affected.
If your accounts department is awash with multiple people updating loads of spreadsheets, some of which may be outdated or duplicated, then one of the first ways you can improve your efficiency is to streamline your financial reporting. Here are five key ways to do this.
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1. Move all your financial data to the cloud
Spreadsheets are easy to use but can be difficult to produce as the data has to be collated from multiple sources. Once a spreadsheet does exist, you then have to wait as staff manually integrate and reconcile data. Then there are the formulas that must be created, the formatting that has to be done, and the charts that have to be generated.
Nowadays, more and more people are using cloud-based systems. In fact, one Statista report showed that by 2018, 3.6 billion people were already using cloud computing to make their work easier, faster, and more efficient. Software that provides a good cloud-based financial planning and analysis solution like Xelix can be excellent for ensuring that all up-to-date financial data is available to your accounts department via the cloud. This also makes sure the data is easy to obtain and search through, rather than buried in spreadsheets and reports.
2. Centralise your information
In accounting, even small mistakes can cause a lot of issues. In manual reporting, where many people are accessing and changing data multiple times throughout the day, these mistakes become more and more likely, and may also be harder to spot. If you move all calculations, data and security to one place, it means everyone is working from the same documents and using the same information. If there are any errors, these only need to be searched for in one place and only need to be rectified in that one place too. This drastically improves accuracy and also frees up more time for your team to focus on other things.
3. Let users use the system as and when they need
Financial reporting is becoming harder and more complex because there are more systems which in turn generate more data. These problems become more acute when systems aren’t fully integrated and when people find themselves repeating tasks that others have already undertaken.
To avoid this, let your business users access the reports they need themselves. This enables your accounts department to work on more important tasks and also enables business users to get the information they need quicker.
4. Ensure you work with other departments
It’s important that the finance department enables collaboration. If everyone agrees on the same metrics, calculations, KPIs, reports, and data, then everything will run more smoothly. Moving to a cloud-based financial planning and analysis solution will make this possible.
5. Data analytics
Data analytics is making big data manageable in a way that it never was before. In finance, analytics can make an enormous difference to the quality of your data and help you produce much more insightful and informative reports. By using descriptive analytics, you can also pick up patterns, trends, and causes that you would never be able to pick up manually.
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