Automating Month-end Reporting

The month-end reporting process can be long, convoluted and therefore potentially error-prone. It can take finance staff away from other valuable activities. And the process is repeated every month.

Therefore, it makes sense to try and automate this process as far as possible. This will give the following positive outcomes:-

  • Quicker reporting
  • Better accuracy
  • Greater Financial Controller efficiency
  • Scale-ability

Will Marr has experience of automating month-end reporting processes from Sage, Pegasus and other accounting and ERP systems.

Case Study – Seacourt Ltd

Background: At Seacourt printers, the financial controller was only able to complete the month-end reporting process by around the 20th of the month due to the volume of month-end work. This meant that he was spending a lot of time on this work, he was then late in doing all his other duties, and the management reports were needed sooner. In addition, this cycle was demotivating the financial controller, and so Seacourt were concerned that he might leave. Finally, as a direct result of these delays, debtors were too high, tying up valuable cash, because invoice production and credit control were happening too late.

Scope of Work: Will Marr spent a day fact-finding and then put together a series of proposals which the client agreed to. Over the course of the next few months, he automated the reporting process by building reports in Excel which would extract the information required from standard Sage reports, and in the format wanted by the client. This included built-in checks and controls, conditional formatting, and a user guide to explain how to use the new reporting system. In addition, Will spent time each week with the financial controller, helping him with his work-load and providing guidance and support on improving month-end.

 Result: The end result was that the month-end process was a lot quicker, saving the financial controller 15% of his time through the month, every month, freeing up significant time for him to focus on other valuable activities. In addition, the new set-up was scalable, so that it would enable the company to grow without needing extra resources in the finance team.

 

 

Testimonial

“Seacourt was experiencing a rapid growth in sales, due to the great environmental focus we had developed. But our finance manager was finding it increasingly difficult to keep up; the month-end reports were late, and the finance function couldn’t cope with any further sales growth. The knock-on effect was that it was taking too long to raise sales invoices, and debtors were increasing, tying up cash in the business.

Will came in like a breath of fresh air, and working with our finance manager, stream-lined the month-end process so it is quicker and easier. This freed up the finance manager to give him time to chase invoices. The finance function now works well for the business and is not holding back our growth”.

Gareth Dinnage,

MD – Seacourt Ltd