The right reporting method not only saves countless hours but can also make your financial reporting process a lot easier.

This post will explore key differences between reporting out of your accounting system vs reporting from Excel.

Why do we so often end up in Excel?

It can often be easier to create the reports you need in Excel than in the system.

It may be that your accounting system doesn’t quite provide you with the information you need in the right layout. Or perhaps, not all the information that you need is currently stored in your accounting system; it may be siloed in another operational system.

It seems easy to download the data each week, consolidate the data with other information, transform it, manipulate it and send it out to the relevant stakeholders.

However, this approach can be tedious and time-consuming. It also often exposes the organisation to key risks.

In fact, a lot could go wrong. For instance, you could send out reports that contain errors or omissions to senior leadership. Your auditor may reject your reports as not sufficiently robust due to lack of data controls within Excel.

This can be a short-term solution, but you’ll likely find that it’s not scalable as your business grows and your reporting requirements evolve.

Why you need to report out of your accounting system

Reporting from your accounting system is a much more robust solution. It gives you greater control over the information you send out as well as how it’s managed and updated.

It means that any changes made to your data are automatically reflected in the reports that are sent to your stakeholders. It also means that there is a trail of what information was changed, by whom and when – which can be important in the event of an audit.

But I really like Excel! Do I have any options?

Excel is a great tool for data analysis, processing, and manipulation. Having the ability to create relationships between data sets can be extremely powerful.

However, Excel is not designed as a complete tool for reporting on its own.

Often, accounting systems will have third party add-on tools available that can bridge the gap between what you can do in Excel and what your accounting system can do. However, as they’re developed by different software authors they may not be as robust as having it all from the same software author.

Here at FinanSys, we offer organisations the ability to easily export data from their accounting system, Infor SunSystems, straight into Excel via a user-friendly Excel Add-in (Infor Q&A) without the need to spend hours manipulating or transforming your data.

This enables customers to leverage the power of Excel, but importantly have all of your data reside within the accounting system.

Sounds great! How do you handle data stored in other systems though?

That’s one of the benefits of using SunSystems as your accounting software. SunSystems has three powerful levels of integration that allow you to automate the process of taking both financial and non-financial data from other operational systems into your accounting system.

This allows you to have a single source of truth for all data, making reporting and decision-making much easier. Reports come straight out of your accounting system as frequently as you need without the requirement to spend hours tweaking your reports.

How do we get started?

If you’re interested in learning more about how Infor SunSystems with Q&A can help with your reporting needs or any other finance-related challenges, please contact FinanSys. We’d be happy to help!