Despite occurring predictably, annual and quarterly financial reporting remains an intense weight on teams across the globe. From consolidating data to writing reports and publishing material, timely delivery is bogged down by fragmented workflows. The full stack of manual finance reporting processes can keep your team working around the clock, only to succumb to sunk costs, inaccurate reports, security risks, and compliance mishaps. This begs the question – can you automate financial reporting?
Enterprise finance teams are realizing that AI-based intelligent reporting automation (IRA) allows them to dodge the stressful cycle and regain power over their time. Our modern solutions to periodic financial reporting cover the essentials, including:
- Income Statements
- Balance sheet
- Statements of Change in Equity
- Statements of Cash Flow
- Statement of Financial Position
- Noted to Financial Statements
You’ll find automating financial statement reporting can give you the accurate, compliant commentary you need — with invaluable advantages.
What Are the IRA Advantages?
When implementing AI reporting solutions like ours, financial teams gains because they augment their existing staff analysis. Manual tasks often gum up the gears of your organization, capping the true potential of your enterprise’s most analytical minds. The shift from manual carries an instant ROI, with drowning repurposing their brainpower for smarter operational insights.
Automated teams are actionable, agile, and accurate — to the delight of all parties involved, from regulatory bodies to their company’s own staff. Let’s explore some key ways IRA helps you breathe easier come reporting time.
Gain time typically lost to tediously compiling and cleaning up data, not to mention dissecting it for reporting. Our IRA product is designed for speed, without the need for extra maintenance or hours of human attention.
Avoid bottlenecks throttling company productivity during close-of-period. Not only does automation streamline the touchpoints for data processing and analysis, but the frictionless delivery gives your team more bandwidth for other tasks.
Increase operational efficiency by redirecting focus from error checks and mundane data hunting to high-value tasks. Your opportunity costs are substantial when the team is occupied with non-scalable manual number crushing. Finance departments are finding a 100% accurate first-pass of report processing means a compounding leap in valuable output across the whole team.
Host clean, compliant, audit-ready accounts via standardized analysis and reporting. We find teams use our IRA product to easily build compliance processes into annual and quarterly financial reporting. Analysts can map their own narrative-building logic into the platform as they navigate regulatory requirements from IFRS to GAAP. When used organization-wide atop automated data consistency checks, your company’s accounting creates a reliable paper trail for ACCA audits or other inspections.
Better quality reporting is the result of a dedicated error-proofing system. IRA platforms provide automated checks to clear redundant data and reduce risks for manual error. Stack on real-time alerts to provide your team an ongoing way to drill down into specific events as they happen, rather than discovering them in the middle of reporting crunch time.
Reduce delays in reporting to stakeholders and regulation boards with instant report generation. Deadlines are simple when each branch’s data sources are neatly compatible and reporting narratives check the required boxes. Companies are mobilizing faster and more confidently compared to when these checkups were done by hand.
Internal follow up for more insight offers more chances to glean more understanding from the company’s periodic performance. Teams once bogged down by cyclical, manual processing are now putting their energy into collaborative intelligence. As Deloitte recently stated, “the laborious grind of management and financial reporting today likely won’t exist in the future. People will be insight generators, not report builders.”
How to automate financial reporting
Our no-code platform ensures a clean and intuitive set up process. Here’s an overview of what to expect:
- Identify the parts which can be automated.
- Clean and inject your data.
- Build models and distribute them at all company levels.
- Generate and fine-tune your own report.
To start, you’ll need to know what can be automated. Begin by asking, is the process objective? Can you and your team explain the logic from data to conclusion? If yes, our IRA product can model it. We usually find that 80% of the report can be automated without any development.
Cleaning data and moving it into structured datasets is essential to successfully automate financial reporting. Using ERP or analytics data lakes to merge and transform cross-branch data can push this process forward with ease. Whether with ETL or other means, checking data compatibility across sources and destinations will help keep the company consistent for years to come. Injecting the data is yet another simple and clean step once you’ve structured your datasets for central use. Our platform integrates with RPA, ETL, and API, flexibly adapting to all business intelligence platforms.
Model building and distribution across your whole organization is a crucial step towards standardization. This ensures data is reported the same way to ease the data consolidation process. Our no-code environment means no special staff is required to build these models out. You simply pull a few power user analysts onboard for a short time to map out their processes.
Your analysts’ fine-tuning will deliver that final mile in building your company’s authentic reporting narrative. Although our out-of-the-box reporting reads almost no different than your human analysts’ natural writing styles, our platform’s report preview lets analysts choose their preferred commentary with text variants. The Feedback Loop learns from an analyst’s feedback to tailor the voice to your organization.
How long does it take to automate financial reporting
Despite the advanced nature of IRA, finance teams are pleased to find that our product puts no complex coding on their shoulders. Finance automation is no more out of reach than the report building your teams already do today.
With the training we provide, building your first models may take around 2 to 3 weeks. We designed our product to require “no-code” for setup, meaning it can be used directly by accounting and controllers themselves.
Once models are built, you’ll likely spend just 2 hours training your models for deeply customized reporting. Yseop will ensure you have support throughout your training and beyond if needed.
Producing reports is blazing fast. It takes just a few clicks and about 10 seconds of waiting. Compared to days or even weeks of prep for manual reporting, IRA is the clear victor for your bottom line.
Interested in learning more about how Yseop can help you automate financial reporting? Click here.
