The Value of Financial Discovery
Today's Typical Environment
Finance departments, more than any other area in distribution it seems, are getting bogged down in reports and statements that often take up a considerable amount of time to produce. The challenge is to fulfill the perceived needs of all the users that may rely on this information.
Executives, managers and users all have an interest in the numbers and figures, but more than likely, each individual prefers the information to be presented differently and at differing levels of summarization. Finance personnel also tend to rely heavily on Excel spreadsheets, dictating that much of the work in supplying a battery of reports to the organization is manual in nature.
After all is said and done, can it be assured that the right people are getting the right information, and that crucial trends are being discovered at the right time by the right people?
New Possibilities
These challenges continue month after month for distributors that rely heavily on traditional reporting methods. Let’s take a look at a method to move beyond traditional reporting - FINANCIAL DISCOVERY.
What makes Financial Discovery different? Through use of
INDEXT Architecture, Financial Discovery presents financial information in a manner that allows customized, drill down access to the numbers without the use of reports or Excel data captures.
From Concept to Reality
By applying user-defined Discovery Paths (drill downs) to a wide variety of reporting views, executives and users can quickly explore their business from a variety of angles and depths. The reporting views can also present comparative figures (history & budgets) as dollar values, dollar variances and/or percent differences. The discovery paths start at the highest level and go all the way into the actual GL transactions, and one-click sorting helps the user quickly identify values that are worth digging into.
A New Way of Seeing Things
With this new-found flexibility and power, executives and users experience a change of thinking and approach to working with financial information. This is the essence of Financial Discovery – the user is COMPELLED and LED INTO the underlying numbers.
Each user is presented with the high level information in the manner they desire, and determines the order in which they would like to drill down into the information. Variances and trends can be seen at any level of summarization or drill down.
Early Detection Allows for Quick Remedies
Early detection of trends or errors enables timely corrections that minimize the pain and wasted effort of finding out later. Alerts, also known as ‘Exception Traps’, can be set at any level to bring the user straight to a trend or variance when it starts. And by using the intuitive research tools to identify the underlying causes, executives and users become self-sufficient – no longer needing to wait for help from IT or accounting.
More Eyes = More Discoveries
Unlike reporting, discovery does not require users with technical skills. They do not need to know the structure of the tables or field names in the database. And with the Discovery Path security, you can allow budget owners to easily track and manage their team’s performance against a budget.
Deploying Financial Discovery throughout the organization, from the corner office and through all departments, provides company-wide visibility into the health and direction of the business. It empowers people to be accountable for their results and allows more time to be spent working on solutions rather than finding the issues.
