5 Ways To Make Your Financial Reporting Process Easier

A company’s document flow is too time-consuming and energy-consuming because the volume of documents in any company is simply enormous. When it comes to preparing financial reports, financial departments are stressed and pressured by pending deadlines. It is the responsibility of the head of the finance department to develop a workflow plan that makes it more productive and easy while ensuring that the financial paperwork is clear and organized. In this article, we’ll outline a few recommendations on how to make the financial reporting process easier.

Identify the time-consuming steps in the reporting process 

The first thing that will do well in making your work easier is to understand the points that need improvement. To understand this, you can start filling out a list of reporting requirements and processes. This way, you will make your team’s job easier, because based on the plan, they can better focus on their task, and you, in turn, will better understand what your subordinates are spending their time on, and also gives you an idea of what processes are better to automate. 

Different tasks in the finance department have different speeds of completion, and it also depends on the size of the company you work for. So the larger the company, the more time it will take you to perform processes such as manipulation, consolidation, and data entry. 

You, as a manager, should assess the complexity and volume of these operations, and where possible facilitate the work of your employees, for example, provide document templates. 

Standardize and look for ways to improve internal document flow

Standardization ensures that there are no misunderstandings, it helps your team use the same data sources, formatting, calculations, etc. That way you greatly reduce the risk of error and don’t waste time searching for and correcting it. 

Also, standardizing your administrative processes will help you with reporting, which helps speed up the learning and adaptation of your employees. 

Automate repetitive tasks and frequent requests

There’s no doubt that today’s companies are using cloud technology to improve their agility, and if you apply these capabilities to your finance department you certainly won’t regret it. 

For example, using virtual data rooms like https://diliroom.fr/ can help your organization not only protect your sensitive data from leakage but also automate a lot of processes and repetitive queries. This will save you valuable time as well as reduce the risk of human error. 

Centralize your data, tools, and people in a collaborative platform

At first glance, you might think that centralizing data is too complicated and expensive. But this system helps you do a great job with data collection and reduces security risks. Manually, the collection process is time-consuming, but if you have a single source in your system, your employees’ efficiency doubles, and your reporting data is 99.9% likely to be accurate and easily monitored. It also allows you to focus more on strategic projects rather than administrative issues.

Develop a strategy to empower other managers to make data-driven decisions

To develop a quality strategy, you must use the right tools and access to data. The best solution for you is to develop your own culture of data-driven decision-making. This will help managers be more confident in their work and not question your financial statements. Give your managers access to data entry to involve them as much as possible in the process and increase understanding and trust between you.