According to Deloitte, management reporting is the foundation for monitoring performance, tracking against plans and making strategic business decisions. Data ranges from financial data, employee headcount, client, accounts, products, client assets in custody, investment performance, etc.

Complete, accurate and timely management reporting is fundamental to a well-run business and strong finance operations.

Management reporting has changed drastically over the past 30 years or so. Before 1990, most management reports were specific to an individual issue. Leadership teams only examined financials, most of which came from a single system and were entered into Excel, manipulated, and put into a PowerPoint for charting and discussion.

Today there is significantly greater data in a greater number of places, which makes maintaining accuracy a ton of work.

The Challenge

The challenge of management reporting in today’s world is determining how to get all the data you need in one place. Some organizations look to data warehousing to solve this issue, but this option is not ideal. This is because this creates a world within your organization where the IT department lies in the center, with reporting requests often taking a backseat to other issues.

Companies today realize they need a solution that will allow various owners of information to input updated and accurate data into a central source, with data owners originating from different departments such as human resources, accounting, operations, and sales.

What to Do?

Centralizing solutions are the answer.

These systems allow different groups to perform calculations across the entire dataset and generate new summary data that is always available and accurate. Employees should be able to use this data to create reports for different audiences like board members, leadership teams, divisions, departments, and others.

Take for example DataRails. DataRails’ patented technology consolidates and stores all Excel-based data on a cloud-based centralized database. It integrates with any CRM, ERP, General Ledger, or other transactional system of choice. This let’s you see where your business stands, assess your organization’s financial outlook, and determine next steps.

Power BI is used primarily for decentralized analytics and centralized BI provisioning by power users, IT and developers. Find and share meaningful insights with hundreds of data visualizations, built-in AI capabilities, tight Excel integration, and prebuilt and custom data connectors.

Sisense is a big data analytics solution that enables business users to analyze and visualize large volumes of data, complex data sets and/or data that comes from disparate sources. End-users are equipped with the insights they need, when and where they need them.

These systems all simplify business processes. Finally there is one, and only one, set of master data.