How Effective is Consolidated Business Reporting in your Group of Companies?

November 01, 2022

Many companies throughout the UK operate under the ownership of a larger parent company, which may have several other companies as part of the group. This can present challenges in the preparation of financial statements and consolidated reports that provide a holistic view of business performance for the board and parent company stakeholders.

Financial reports of subsidiaries need to be consolidated to create a single version of the truth, and group finance departments often need to query their data to find answers to ad-hoc questions. For overstretched reporting teams, the volume of information that must be collated and submitted can lead to mistakes and misinterpretation. Dependence on complex data structures requires significant expertise to understand them, and, when delivered by scarce IT resources to create and modify reports, can ultimately result in delays and frustration.

Finance and accounting teams need to report and drill across multiple dimensions for financial accounting. Data groupings that combine multiple cost centres and analyse costs by work breakdown structure, internal order, and other fields can be difficult to create with native reporting tools. With subsidiaries using different general ledger systems, different charts of accounts or currencies, group consolidation is one of the most difficult areas for accountants. The risk of mistakes is high, and the potential of penalties for errors is even higher.

Without an enterprise-wide, consolidated reporting capability, many finance teams rely on the error-prone, manual process of dumping data into their accounting or ERP systems, with an over-reliance on Excel to fill in the gaps. Besides finance teams wasting time on manual tasks, company stakeholders and decision-makers are left with limited, static, and sometimes erroneous data presentations, without the appropriate context needed to make decisions. If you are a group of companies, consolidated group financial and business analysis reporting can be particularly challenging.

How can Ascarii help?

Ascarii provides our group clients with advanced cloud-based solutions based on SAP Business One. In addition to the broad business analytics capability of SAP Business One, we also find that many of our group clients like the Sharperlight Excel Add-on. This allows you to create insightful reports in a package that you know and write back the information into SAP Business One. With self-adjusting, multi-directional data structures, it connects to and creates a view of the data that you can understand, allowing users to run cross-company consolidated reports. Simply select the companies you're reporting from and build reports and the level you need for analysis.

Sharperlight is a solution that offers extremely powerful reporting and analysis of your live data, empowering teams to deliver the reports they need for their business to thrive. Particularly useful is its ability to make all user-defined fields and tables available for reporting and analysis using the Query Builder. It facilitates consolidated reporting across multiple companies, allowing users to multi select the companies they’re reporting from and build reports at the level they need.

SAP Business One along with Sharperlight provides a group-level cloud ERP platform with consolidated reporting that enables true business intelligence, supporting you to get the most out of SAP Business One and take your business to the next level. To find out more about how Ascarii’s suite of solutions can help you gain more business insight that you can use to support strategic decisions and take your business to the next level, contact our friendly team now.

 

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