CFO Insights – Revolutionizing reporting in the digital age

Published on: Jul 18, 2019

When you hear the word “reporting,” binders full of spreadsheets, charts, and footnotes might come to mind. Or maybe conference rooms with executives grinding through slide presentations. And behind it all, there’s an army of finance people who’ve been working for weeks to pull it together – a ritual that repeats month after month after month.

In the best of all worlds, this ritual would deliver reports aligned with the changing needs of the business. But that rarely seems to happen.

Instead, when Deloitte surveyed 600 global finance leaders on management reporting, we uncovered this fact: Companies surveyed spent 48% of their time creating and updating reports versus 18% spent on communicating the results to the business. The survey also showed that companies knew they had room for improvement. Three-quarters of those interviewed said they were using standardization as a way to gain efficiency and get insights more quickly. In one company, the commitment to standardize led to replacing 1,000 unique reports with just 50 dashboards.

If standardization alone can enhance performance so dramatically, what would happen if you added digital tools, such as automation, advanced analytics, and machine learning, to the mix?

In this issue of CFO Insights, we will take a look at how companies are using digital tools to upgrade their reporting processes to get better information distributed faster – and what that means for the future of reporting itself.

This publication was released by our US firm.

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