The Economic Crisis is Pushing Businesses to Daily Financial Reporting: Are You Ready?

The current pandemic has brought both societies and economies to a level of crisis never before experienced in our lifetimes. Unlike other disasters, this crisis has occurred on a global scale. The humanitarian impact means that both customers and employees are radically changing behavior, creating a high level of uncertainty for most companies.

It’s time for organizations to rethink how they are doing business. And meeting both current and ongoing shifts will require a higher level of business agility than ever before demanded.

Business agility has long been a key driver of successful organizations. But now it’s become more clear that a business’ ability to quickly and accurately assess a situation and respond to it is critical to navigating a path through this current crisis.

The Shift to Daily Reporting

If you’re not already, this is the time to prioritize business agility. This will look different for each company. What tomorrow looks like highly depends on each organization’s unique characteristics, such as cash flow and how it may change, and applicability of products or services during and after the crisis. Each business needs to consistently evaluate all necessary information in order to adapt to whatever the current situation is.

With the economy balanced on the edge of recession, finance teams are faced with unprecedented challenges that require urgent action. This begins with navigating how to best support a remote workforce. Within that lies a second challenge to maintain financial agility to enable the business to react quickly to fast-changing events.

This starts with having a clear overview of your company’s financial status, including—but not limited to—current cash flow, credit situation, revenue, and expenses. For many companies, this may mean shifting from monthly reporting to daily reporting, as existing financial statements may not account for the sudden changes inflicted on businesses worldwide by this pandemic. Daily reporting can help companies keep a finger on the pulse of vital metrics—such as cash flow, assets and liabilities, and income and overhead—as they see revenue drop quickly without a proportionate decrease in certain fixed operating expenses.

If your finance team is using manual data dumps and spreadsheets to compile your standard monthly reporting package, the prospect of having to do this on a daily basis can seem overwhelming. Adding to that is the fact that managing this style of reporting across a distributed workforce can cause an additional time lag in reporting processes, version control issues, and even data security issues.

Smarter Daily Reporting from Anywhere

There is a better way. insightsoftware offers a portfolio of financial reporting solutions that can help organizations move to a daily reporting process without having to revert to the use of risky and cumbersome static spreadsheets.

CXO Software, an insightsoftware solution, is ideal for organizations looking to provide easy access to daily reporting. With CXO Software, companies can streamline, accelerate, and automate daily financial reporting processes, using data from various sources to create a common financial language throughout the organization. With a unified and easily accessible reporting portal, users can collaborate throughout the entire reporting cycle—whether daily or monthly reporting, whether they’re in the office or at home—digging deeper into the numbers and making greater room for actionable analysis. In addition, teams can provide decision-makers with additional context via narratives that tell the story of the numbers.

The quick pivot most companies had to facilitate in order to support teams working remotely from home during the pandemic has changed the way some are accessing data. In addition, the crisis demands the ability to tell a story right now of where the business is and where it could head based on potential outcomes, and the ability to nimbly reframe that narrative as new information continues to come to light nearly every day.

With sophisticated collaboration features and instant remote access, teams can always access CXO Software to collectively analyze figures. In times like these, every detail counts: Compelling storyboards let Finance create the narrative that accompanies the report in order to tell the stories that reflect the entire financial picture. CXO Software’s self-service reporting features also empower Finance to create any new reports necessary without depending on IT or other far-flung experts on the team.

Get the Right Financial Reporting for Business Agility

In order to support business agility, you need an agile reporting solution. Daily reporting is well supported by CXO Software:

• Create faster time to insight by automating daily reports
• Easily combine data to create multi-source reporting
• Communicate effectively by adding commentaries to daily reports that explain local variances and outliers
• Combine quantitative data with value-added narrative in a single, secure, and collaborative environment
• Enable remote workers to share explanatory storyboards to make it easier to access information in a format non-finance colleagues can understand and access on any device
• Get up and running fast, and start delivering daily reports in as little as 4 days.

Build daily and monthly reports that support business agility from a single source of truth on a platform pre-built for the complexities, hierarchies, and dimensions of financial data. See how CXO Software can transform your reporting to promote business agility. Request a free trial now.