If your organization relies on Excel-based reporting tools, here’s a scenario you can easily relate to:

• Each month, your finance department spends several days preparing reports.
• Data is dumped out of your ERP system (because we all know ERP systems are built for transactions, not reporting) and into Excel (or Excel-based tool) as a full trial balance.
• Various reports are divvyed up to different finance staff – your balance sheet, various income statements for different stakeholders, and cash flow statements.
• After days of highly manual reviews and adjustments, it’s time to manually send out dozens of emails to your various stakeholders.

Just writing about the process is tiring. But it’s not over.

More pain is thrown into the mix when a new GL account is introduced, or a new department, or business line. One vice president wants her income statement to reflect year-over-year growth, while another wants variance to budget, while yet another wants to see his departments within columns.

Imagine the collective groans of the finance team, and additional days of maintenance and changes across files, tabs, columns, and formulas. All the while trying to control the added risk of errors that has been thrown into the mix.

So far, we’ve addressed the experiences of an accounting organization that relies on Excel as a reporting tool. But now, let’s take a look at what the component-based architecture found in FYIsoft’s financial statement software can do for the process.

Our component-based architecture uses a human-centric design where the physical structure of financial statements drives the design of report writing. Think about it this way: every financial statement – whether income statement, balance sheet or cash flow – has one or more ROWS, one or more COLUMNS, and can be ORGANIZATIONALLY SLICED in multiple ways.

We call them definitions. You’ll call them lifesavers.

That’s the genius of our financial reporting software, ReportFYI. It allows you to tackle report design across three basic building blocks: Rows, Columns, and Organizational Trees. You can have as many definitions sitting on a shelf as you need so you can easily mix-and-match any combination that is needed. Which also means you can create any report on the fly, without the weary pains described earlier.

Every financial report is powered by one of each definition. When it comes time to make an adjustment to an existing definition, you simply make the change and every report that uses that definition is automatically updated. Safely, securely, and efficiently. It really is that easy.

The ease of this design structure is particularly ideal for those with complex reporting needs such as multi-entity consolidations, or frequently changing reporting demands that occur in fast-growing companies. For FYIsoft customers, a process that has previously taken days or weeks of time can now be completed in minutes .

If your Excel-based financial reporting has your team weary, it’s time to take a closer look at FYIsoft and discover how easy financial reporting can be. Schedule a demo today.