How to Get Great Reporting

From the April/May 2010 Issue

Accountants should spend the majority of their time analyzing numbers, not generating and formatting numbers. For you public practice accountants, how much extra value does your client see for your efforts in making a report pretty? Sure, you don’t want it ugly, and the final work product the client sees and pays for is your report, but isn’t it the content that really counts? Once the journal entries are complete, shouldn’t the reporting be virtually automatic? How much profit is wasted getting the final reports out? For those accountants in industry, think about the amount of time spent preparing financials on a monthly basis or on demand that could be much better spent helping consumers of the data understand the issues and taking action!

A fundamental issue for most systems is how to easily get flexible, accurate reporting. Most of us today use Excel as a universal reporting tool, and each version of Microsoft Office provides new features to improve reporting. This year’s version of Office 2010 is no exception. Historically, we have received universal reporting through tools like FRx, F9 and Crystal Report writer. CaseWare tried to automate report writing with CaseView, and CCH’s Engagement used Excel formatting. Both made some progress on easier reporting. However, many of these tools took more advanced skills to use effectively, and many accountants did not take the time to learn to use these products well.

Repetitive reporting from QuickBooks has been fairly static until recently with tools like Adagio FX from Softrak and Intuit’s QuickBooks Financial Statement Designer (FSD) and Statement Writer (ISW), and the integration these products bring to Excel. Write-up pack-ages like Thomson Reuters Write-Up CS or Trial Balance CS or AccountantsWorld’s Accounting Relief have gotten us the closest to having tools that would allow production of financials including income statements, balance sheets and cash flow statements that would be produced with very little intervention from the supporting numbers. We could standardize the formats and get consistent results with minimal manipulation. However, flexibility is still limited.

WHAT IS NEEDED?
The vision for reporting can be pretty simple. However, each of us sees the need through a slightly different set of glasses from a slightly different angle. And that’s what makes it so hard for publishers to create easy-to-use products that are flexible. In my ideal world, a reporting tool would have the following: