Group Financial Reporting is a broad term and includes a variety of ativities that keeps Controllers, CFOs and their team members busy in any organisation. It's importance to the overall strategy and success of the company cannot be over emphasised.
As frauds and other white collar crimes become more frequent, inefficiencies in the reporting systems, processes and practices can destroy enormous value. This is also why regulators are increasing their focus on disclosures and that in turn creates challenges for the reporting team all the way from CFO to the last assistant.
Group Financial reporting also involves several mundane tasks that consume time and resources and become bottlenecks that impact its usefulness to the organisation. This is where modern software solutions play a valuable role.
But then again most companies struggle with selecting and implementing the "right" package and after much trouble go back to good ol' Excel. We hope to make a difference for such customers.
Most businesses operate as a group and consist of several legal entities as well as joint ventures and affiliates. These operations are often spread across Asia or anywhere in the world.
For such groups, consolidating financial information on a regular basis is a major task. This involves collating data, translation to common currencies, eliminating intra-group activities etc.
The data collected may involve actual financials as well as budgets and forecasts as well as "flash" estimates.
This data after processing and adjustments, also feeds various reports to management, often delivered as PPT, Excel or PDF files. Some are sent over to "BI" tools such as Qlik for viewing in dashboards and web or mobile apps.
For listed companies, statutory disclosures to stock exchange drive much of the activities done as part of the Financial consolidation process. In fact, many use the same information for both local management and external stakeholder reporting, with some differences in extent of detail or breakdowns.
In addition to the usual challenges of Financial consolidation, increasing regulatory burden and disclosure requirements, driven by shareholders and other stakeholders as well as governments create further "hassles". These often require well implemented software systems to make life easier for the finance team.
While basic financial consolidation and statutory reporting are the "must have" for any organisation, there is an enormous amount of other financial as well as non financial reporting possibile and necessary.
These are the "nice to have" reports that many line managers and operating Directors often ask for and rarely get as per their wishes. Often, companies short of staff or too busy just doing basic reporting, do not find time for anything beyond that.
Well planned and implemented reporting systems can help finance teams deliver a lot more than basic financials - these may involve product lines, customers, competitive analysis, segment reporting, Cost center or other details and so on.
There are also lots of situation where data is there, but reports are not! This could be because data is buried in core business systems like Real estate or Hotel or Logistics systems but cannot be made available to a wider group of managers simply because the systems are complex, reporting is difficult and IT has no time!