Far too often, a company's financial reporting is limited to a set of financial statements and if more than the basic financial statements are provided in a financial reporting package, the supplementary data is often prepared manually in Word or Excel.

A good financial reporting package should ideally consist of a variety of financial statements as welll as meaningful supplementary data.  Some additional data elements that are meaningful to a business decision maker are:

• Top X customers
• Top X items
• Sales Trends
• Job Profitability
• Etc.

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.             

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. 

   Historically companies have prepared and presented formal financial statement monthly.  While this standard practice still has its place for formal reporting,  there is also a need for companies to give serious consideration to reporting much more frequently for informal internal reporting.  Up until now, the relatively infrequent monthly reporting was primarily due to the amount of time and effort it would take to prepare and distribute financial reports, often taking days or even weeks.