Management Reporting
Many companies have monthly reporting routines which culminate in structured reports being printed and issued to all managers. Such monthly reports containing elements, like
- Balance Sheet,
- Profit and Loss A/c with various comparisons,
- cost centre expenditure with various comparisons,
- variance analysis of product manufacturing costs,
- labour useage, recovery and charge out rates,
- sales and marketing performance with various comparisons,
- management commentary covering the main functional areas and business performance,
- detailed reports from the ERP system.
All of this takes time to prepare and issue - normally one to two weeks.
Making the data obsolete before the report is even issued!
In to-days modern business world with advanced networks and internal web sites, the need to print physical copies of such monthly reports has largely been removed by having a sub-section of an internal web site available to all managers to access and review via a web browser, no matter where they are in the world.
To support the construction of such intranet 'management report' sites it is important that the ERP system used by the company can produce and save reports in HTML format so that they can be easily incorporated into the site. In fact on being produced by the ERP system they could be saved directly onto the web site making them immediately available. So that managers who need to add commentary have the data available on which to comment.
The automatic production of reporting elements and the removal of printing greatly reduces the man hours and elapsed time required to obtain finished reports.
Producing more timely reports makes the data far more relevant for supporting those business decisions required to change course and obtain a better outcome.
It is suggested that an outline of the management report for each period is built at the start of the financial year, so that as the year unfolds, each periods report can be constructed by the accountants and managers concerned with little to no requirement placed on IT staff.
- Balance Sheet,
- Profit and Loss A/c with various comparisons,
- cost centre expenditure with various comparisons,
- variance analysis of product manufacturing costs,
- labour useage, recovery and charge out rates,
- sales and marketing performance with various comparisons,
- management commentary covering the main functional areas and business performance,
- detailed reports from the ERP system.
All of this takes time to prepare and issue - normally one to two weeks.
Making the data obsolete before the report is even issued!
In to-days modern business world with advanced networks and internal web sites, the need to print physical copies of such monthly reports has largely been removed by having a sub-section of an internal web site available to all managers to access and review via a web browser, no matter where they are in the world.
To support the construction of such intranet 'management report' sites it is important that the ERP system used by the company can produce and save reports in HTML format so that they can be easily incorporated into the site. In fact on being produced by the ERP system they could be saved directly onto the web site making them immediately available. So that managers who need to add commentary have the data available on which to comment.
The automatic production of reporting elements and the removal of printing greatly reduces the man hours and elapsed time required to obtain finished reports.
Producing more timely reports makes the data far more relevant for supporting those business decisions required to change course and obtain a better outcome.
It is suggested that an outline of the management report for each period is built at the start of the financial year, so that as the year unfolds, each periods report can be constructed by the accountants and managers concerned with little to no requirement placed on IT staff.
posted by Bob @ 7:02:00 PM
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