Management Reporting: Let’s Stop Reinventing the Wheel

It’s a basic fact of business decision-making. Access to accurate data, and timely commentary and analytics is critical to making sound business decisions. And the pressure to provide that data and analysis to management is only becoming more intense. Uncertainty and volatility in the economy is increasing the need for frequent forecasting, project updates and roadmaps in most organizations. A quick turnaround of detailed reports with embedded narrative is essential for management teams anxious to keep their fingers on the pulse of the marketplace.

Yet, for many departments, report building is often a tedious, time consuming and error prone process. Management presentations and reports are built following a series of complex, manual tasks, usually copying and pasting data (operational, statistical, performance, financial, etc.) and related commentary into disparate Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint files, then emailing these files to multiple authors, in different functional areas, throughout the organization for editing and approval. This makes it difficult for report builders, contributors and reviewers to collaborate. And someone is always left to compile all the revisions from cross-functional managers. This can lead to inaccurate, out of-date reports because of the inherent difficulties in aggregating plans and analysis from around the organization into an enterprise-level view. The process provides little transparency or timeliness of data and increases the risk of inaccuracies, which can cause management to question the integrity of data in key internal reports.