10 Things To Consider When Selecting a Financial Reporting Solution

Written by Svitlana Karpenko

Business Intelligence is an expression that’s being used (and overused) to describe a broad range of applications and technologies for gathering, storing and analyzing data to help business users make better decisions. financial reporting

Many businesses focus on Financial Reporting software applications as their primary form of Business Intelligence. With Microsoft discontinuing their development of FRx, there is now a renewed focus on finding a Financial Reporting application that’s the best fit for a companies Financial Reporting requirements.

It’s no longer sufficient for a Financial Reporting solution to produce a compliant Balance Sheet, Income Statement and Statement of Cash Flows. While these are necessities, there is much more to consider.

Here are 10 things to consider when choosing a Financial Reporting Solution

Integration with your current ERP system - some financial reporting applications require a data dump from a company's ERP system to be fed into their product. A pre-defined integration with a company's ERP system is a ‘must-have’ requirement that will allow real-time access to business data.
Access to Budget, Actual, Historical and Non-Financial information - Does the financial reporting solution have any limits to the number of budgets or forecasts? How difficult is it to report on non-financial information?
Ability to report on department, cost center, business unit or project – in addition to standard general ledger classification.
Flexibility – does the financial reporting solution have the ability to change perspective to alternative segments or attributes of the chart of accounts.
Use of wildcards or account ranges - Can these be used to lower the cost of maintaining reports as accounts and segments get added to the chart of accounts?
Multicurrency support - if a business transacts in the global marketplace
Consolidation capabilities – In this area, does an application support consolidation when the companies do not have common charts of accounts?
Drill-Down capability – Does the Financial Reporting application offer drill down to supporting information? Is the information displayed in the drilldown complete and meaningful? Is the content customizable?
Reporting capabilities on data in addition to General Ledger – there may be a need to include operational data in financial reports. For instance, to report on a particular product line or customer base.
Report Distribution - What options are available for distributing reports to users? Some options here are e-mail or web publishing. Dashboard publication may also be an option – for instance on an intranet site. Here, consideration should be given to how to secure specific report segmentation to specific users. What are the drilldown capabilities to users when a report has been automatically distributed to them?