917.848.7284 – Data for Finance and Accounting

mobile-logo
Top

KPIs

0
0
Financial Reporting Software, KPIs

Beyond the more strategic concepts of getting people to look at your numbers, I thought it would be worthwhile to review the basic ways your field users or casual users - the people NOT entering transactions - can access your data. These are the steps we typically follow in trying to meet our clients' needs in distributing reports: 1. Report Bursting "Bursting" just means emailing - sending the reports out to a distribution list by email, generally in PDF format.In simple bursting solutions, we add the appropriate user email to each page so the program can divide the report into pieces and send each piece to the appropriate person. In more complex situations where you need to mix and match which data each person needs, more complex software may be needed to determine who gets which piece based on logic in the report. 2. Report Portal When sending reports by email the PDF's can...

by
0
0
Financial Reporting Software, KPIs

I recently came across this BBC article by Michael Blastand, author of The Numbers Game (which I'd recommend for any Numberphobe who wants to get a better understanding of how numbers work). His main point is that often things change because that's the nature of the world, not because of any particular skill or value on the part of an executive or manager. Using examples ranging from steel production to film production, Blastland emphasizes that we shouldn't look for deep knowledge in short term trends. In process control, different batches of steel can have a normal variation in quality. It's the long-term trend, and not the immediate data point, that really matters. Sometimes less real-time information is better information. I can't count the number of times I've seen people drilling into detail which simply isn't meaningful. Detailed analysis of a monthly variance of a few percentage points which were really only...

by
0
0
Financial Reporting Software, KPIs

I recently attended the CFO CPM Conference, and one topic I heard in both presentations and in discussions with other attendees was the decline of the balanced scorecard. Briefly, the balanced scorecard methodology states that for every part of a business one should have a defined set of metrics, financial and non-financial, to measure progress. The problem is that people wind up measuring too many things. Many scorecards have 20 items or more that people are asked to manage. In my experience I've learned that when people are asked to manage that many numbers, they don't really manage any of them. Which gives me the opportunity to highlight one of the ?Threes? in Red Three: No person can keep more than three objectives in their mind when thinking about their success at work. As an example, at my last company job descriptions set about 37 different evaluation points for bonuses. As part of a...

by