Developing insightful management reporting

Introduction

Whilst the case for management reporting is clear, many finance executives share the same dissatisfactions with the data and technologies at their disposal and the effort needed to provide insightful reports. This isn’t surprising, delivering insight is difficult - the key finance enablers of information & systems, organization & people, and process & policy all play their part and are fundamentally interlinked. Unravelling and prioritising them is challenging.

Digitisation of Finance presents opportunities. New tools can mine and extract insights from ever larger datasets. Breakthroughs in data discovery, visualisation and in-memory computing equip finance to perform real-time scenario analyses, alert audiences and trigger interventions as soon as KPI exceptions are identified. As the amount of data available to reporting continues to expand, governance, more than ever, is the watchword.

This report shares some findings from our recent survey of management reporting practices, and offers some insights into opportunities for finance teams to re-balance and focus even more on their role as trusted partners and co-pilots for their businesses.