We are seeing that the last mile of reporting remains stubbornly labour-intensive. To bring your financial and regulatory reporting to the next level there must be a digitised process that facilitates collaboration, transparency and control.
James Dunne, Managing Director in KPMG’s Management Consulting practice, addresses the biggest challenges faced by organisations when updating their reporting processes and recommends how to bring digital reporting processes to the next level.
Digital acceleration requires a cultural shift in the way the finance organisation thinks and operates.
Digitising the last mile of reporting
In the last few years cloud-enabled technology has allowed finance departments to digitise and automate elements of the monthly, quarterly and annual record to report (R2R) process.
This effort and investment has typically been devoted to automating the early days of the R2R period close, from the time companies start collecting data until they finalise calculating the numbers and derive a consolidated trial balance which typically occurs three to six days later.
In fact, most organisations have already integrated some form of process automation into their monthly closing process-for example, robotic processing automation or cloud reconciliation tools.
By using automation and other digital capabilities, many companies have been able to reduce their time to derive trial balances by several days. When implemented properly, the finance department receives period-end source data more quickly and with little or no need for correction or for finance to play the role of the "fixer:'
But what we see amongst our clients is that this is typically where the digital journey stops.
Automating data from the ledger to the report
Despite all of the advancements in technology that have been made, most companies really struggle to digitally enable the rest of the reporting process and that this last mile of reporting remains stubbornly labour intensive, with the use of multiple data sources, excel spreadsheets, word documents, power point decks, versions of versions and numerous calls and emails going back and forth.
In my experience, to bring reporting to the next level there must be a digitised process where the output from the general ledger or consolidation tool gets seamlessly combined with other content, automatically populated into reporting, and approved and published in a way that allows collaboration and transparency across your teams.
Fortunately, there are digital technologies available that enable much greater data alignment, automation of report preparation and workflow integration. These digital reporting tools are allowing companies to streamline their reporting processes, leading to quicker approvals, and greatly enhanced collaboration all the way through to publishing final reports.
We know that it will still take time for the key people to analyse and conclude on the messaging and storytelling behind the numbers but with better use of technology in the last mile of reporting we can now take out the roadblocks to speed up the workday timetable.
The more manual components there are in the R2R process, the slower and less efficient it is. And while many companies have transformed their technology and heavily automated their systems for creating and gathering the data at the front end, these time savings and efficiencies may be frittered away on the back end by an inefficient and ad hoc reporting process.
Get in touch
If you have any queries about digitising your finance function, from record to report, please contact James Dunne of our Management Consulting team. We look forward to hearing from you.
James Dunne
Managing Director
KPMG in Ireland