How a Tech Upgrade Can Transform Your Financial Reporting Process

Financial reporting is when accounting evolves from an obligation into an opportunity. Organizations gain clear insights into their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that guide their strategy.

That’s the case in an ideal world. In the real world, however, financial reporting often is an obligation at best and an obstacle at worst. It’s not that businesses don’t treat the process seriously enough, it’s that common issues make reports hard to create and even harder to trust.

• Data silos require accountants to invest massive amounts of resources simply collecting and compiling data from scattered sources.
• Underpowered reporting tools limit how accountants can work with data while requiring a lot of manual input and verification.
• Reports are created slowly, at risk of errors and omissions and full of shallow insights that deliver little value to decision makers.
• Strategic decision making and long-term growth planning suffer when reports are limited to financial data and don’t also incorporate operational data.

A lot of mental health agencies find themselves in this predicament. Reporting takes a huge amount of time, labor and expertise. But by the time the reports are complete, they’re outdated, irrelevant or inaccurate. Simply maintaining the status quo takes a huge amount of input yet falls far short of expectations.

Finding the solution starts with identifying the problem, and for a lot of mental health agencies that leads back to their accounting software. Legacy systems may have once been adequate, and even advantageous. But data volumes, strategic opportunities, regulatory obligations and other variables are all growing. Outdated and underpowered accounting systems simply can't keep up, which is why reporting suffers.

A cloud-based, data-driven financial management solution transforms the reporting process. Financial and operational data are managed on a shared platform accessible to any number of employees or stakeholders. The platform is enhanced with reporting tools that are as intuitive as they are advanced. Most importantly, human labor is automated to help make reporting simultaneously faster and better.

The exact effect of an accounting upgrade is different for every organization, but these tools provide universal benefits:

• Relying on a single platform for all accounting and operational data makes finding relevant facts and figures easy and quick.
• Automated analytics tools empower organizations to run reports whenever they want and with any focus they want. In-depth financial insights are available on demand.
• Customized reporting tools fit into organizational charts and previous workflows, unlike the out-of-the-box solutions of the past.
• Accounting data and tools are accessible to stakeholders across an organization, so anyone can run reports and build financial considerations into their decision making.

If you have questions about how you can upgrade your technology to transform your financial reporting, contact BKD Technologies to discuss your own innovation.