Financial Reporting Software Solutions

The goal of financial reporting is primarily to communicate financial results and position accurately. However, there are other purposes for this process, such as ensuring compliance with accounting standards, facilitating more informed decision-making, and supporting strategic planning.

Effective and streamlined financial reporting is absolutely critical to any modern enterprise because it directly shapes investor and creditor trust. It also enables legally required disclosures and helps identify trends and risks quickly. Our financial experts recommend using financial dashboards and built-in audit trails (via tools like Wands for Oracle and SAP, Jet Reports, and Hubble) to bolster transparency, regulatory compliance, and cross-functional collaboration for a competitive edge.

So now that we understand financial reporting, how do software tools fit into this? While most ERPs have pre-built financial reports and native report-writing tools, these are often too rigid for finance teams to quickly adjust and update themselves. Despite this, every organization will need to customize the templates to fit their unique organization’s structure and operations.

Therefore, many businesses turn to purpose-built financial reporting software. These tools automate pulling financial data, understand your ERP’s data structures, account for the ins and outs of financial models, and can access live data without requiring technical know-how or IT support. Financial reporting software like Wands for Oracle and Wands for SAP puts finance teams in control of their reporting, enabling them to create refreshable, custom dashboards. This saves time and ensures consistent, accurate results while providing insights into the organization’s financial health and performance.

When it comes to financial reporting, companies are subject to standards and laws like GAAP and IFRS. These standards define rules for how transactions need to be recorded, how presentations should be formatted, what measurement methods can be used, and more. This is crucial for financial teams to understand and accommodate in their reporting to ensure clarity, comparability, and legal compliance. Because of this, financial reporting software needs to have compliance checks, audit trails, and adherent reporting templates that support these standards.

Improving your organization’s financial reporting with tools like Wands and Jet Reports results in:

• Shortened reporting and close cycle time (by up to 40%)
• Reduced costs via automated workflows
• Improved accuracy and error mitigation
• Better decision-making via real-time insights and forecasts
• Enhanced collaboration through centralized and shareable reporting

When considering financial reporting software, look for key features like:

• Data integration: The software should seamlessly integrate with your ERP system to pull financial data from various modules and departments.
• Pre-built templates and business views: The software should offer wizards and guides for your specific ERP to help get your financial reporting up and running faster and easier.
• Customizable reporting: It should offer flexible report templates and the ability to create custom reports tailored to your business needs.
• Drill-down functionality: The software should allow users to drill down into the underlying financial data for more detailed analysis.
• Dashboards and visualizations: Visual representations, such as graphs and charts, can provide a clear overview of financial metrics and trends.
• Security and access controls: Robust security features should be in place to protect sensitive financial data and limit access based on user roles.

We recommend starting by defining the report’s purpose and audience to get a framework for what data will be relevant. From there, gather your ERP, GL, and other data, cleaning them and transforming the information into standardized formats. Next, you can perform variance/ratio analysis, add commentary to trends, and start formatting the data with clear charts and tables. Once the report is ready, make sure to review for accuracy and distribute to the relevant stakeholders.

Instead of doing all of this manually, insightsoftware platforms streamline the process with pre-built templates, Excel-native interfaces and embeddings, interactive visuals, drag-and-drop creation, and automated distribution. Our tools help finance teams write and build financial reports in no time, creating stunning and engaging charts that save hours of headaches at the same time.

While you can set up basic, static reports in Excel, it’s difficult to create Excel-based reports that update with real-time data and interactive elements. Thankfully, insightsoftware offers a number of different Excel add-ins to extend your financial reporting capabilities from within the familiar spreadsheet interface. Jet Reports, Spreadsheet Server, Atlas, Wands for Oracle, and Wands for SAP are all financial reporting tools that connect to different ERP systems and enhance your reporting capabilities right in Excel. They make it easy to quickly create and customize financial reports that maintain current data from your various warehouses, systems, and other data sources.

The best way to automate financial reporting is to incorporate direct integrations with your ERP. This enables you to build refreshable reports and dashboards with scheduled chart generation and distribution. The same insightsoftware platforms we mentioned above (Jet Reports, Spreadsheet Server, Atlas, and Wands for Oracle/SAP) help automate these processes, with the assistance of other tools like Jet Analytics (data warehouse automation) and CXO (executive dashboards). Our suite of financial reporting software makes it easy to automate your processes and deliver higher-quality insights in no time.

Financial reporting software is designed to handle multi-currency and multi-company operations. It should be capable of consolidating financial data from multiple entities or subsidiaries, accommodating different currencies, and providing accurate reports in the desired currency. This functionality allows businesses operating internationally or with multiple entities to manage their financial reporting requirements effectively.

If your company has a more complex organizational structure, you will likely use a dedicated close and consolidate system to prepare your group accounts. Alongside this, you can use specialist financial reporting software, like CXO Software, to report your consolidated accounts efficiently and accurately.

Some of the most popular financial reporting vendors include Workday, SAP, and Oracle. However, these systems (along with other financial reporting options on the market) often fall short when it comes to ease of use and flexibility. This is precisely what helps insightsoftware deliver the best financial reporting software for enterprise accounting teams. Our platforms offer finance-owned tools, Excel-native experiences, rapid setup and deployment, and compatibility with more than 140 ERPs.

insightsoftware financial reporting software stands out from other tools because of our combination of functionality and ease of use. Pre-built ERP connectivity shortens time to value, while our Excel-native solutions mean your team doesn’t need to learn a new interface. This isn’t at the cost of reporting features, though, with real-time drillable dashboards and compliance-ready traceability for governance. insightsoftware platforms also use cutting-edge automation to refresh, consolidate, and distribute reports, all within an intuitive, user-friendly interface to reduce IT reliance.