Today’s accounting departments want financial report writers that require a minimal amount of report maintenance when there are changes in the underlying accounting system, such as new account numbers. Furthermore, they always want to be able to rest assured that their financial statements include any segment or dimension updates done in the general ledger, thus assuring that their financial statements are correct.

You can use BI360‘s Expanding Group concept to automatically list accounts based on ranges. This will capture any new account within the range that has been created in the general ledger. The use of expanding groups also has additional benefits such as faster report design process and shorter report execution time.

Expanding groups are groupings of one or more columns or rows within a BI360 Excel spreadsheet that repeat for a specified range of values. For example, just like you can have account ranges dynamically listing accounts in the report rows, you can have a column in your spreadsheet that repeats for each month for the current year.  This saves you time and effort over having to define each of the 12 columns one at a time.  These groups are easy to set up — just a matter of checking the ‘expanding’ option in the BI360 report definition when adding data fields to columns or rows of your spreadsheet.

Every day in almost every modern business around the world, employees and managers are looking at reports. Depending on roles and responsibilities, these report consumers are seeking an understanding of a particular area of the business by reviewing vendor reports, sales reports, inventory reports, financial statements, and more. The faster an employee can find the answer they are looking for and then move on with their day, the less time is wasted and the faster any potential action items resulting from the analysis can take place.

Take this example: A majority of corporate and government organizations have department heads with budget responsibilities. Typically, the accounting department will run departmental financial statements once a month and distribute them out to each department head for review. The department manager will then look at the actual and budget figures and pay particular attention to the budget variance column. He or she knows that if there is a big budget variance, there is some explaining to do. However, in order for variance explanations to be provided, the manager needs to understand why the variance occurred in the first place. So, next starts a process of contacting accounting and asking for detailed transactional data for the revenue or expense items that had the big variances. In most organizations, this process can take days and will involve several people and back and forth communication. In other words, it is a slow, costly and clumsy process.

Now, how should the above process work in an ideal world? Here is an example:
1. The manager runs the report on-demand (accounting no longer needs to run and distribute it).
2. The manager reviews the report and easily spots the variances that the company has agreed are significant. E.g. those that are more than 10% above/below the budget. These variances stick out clearly in the report because they have red traffic lights next to them.
3. The manager clicks on each number in question and drills down to the general ledger (GL) detail. If more information is needed, the manager drills from the GL detail and into the related sub-ledger detail, e.g. to see the line items on a purchase order or a sales order.
4. Armed with the same knowledge as an accountant sitting with the accounting system open all day, the department manager now knows why the budget variance occurred and instead of e-mailing the CFO or asking for a meeting, he or she simply enters the explanation in a comment column on the report and saves it to the database so the comment is stored for years to come.

The whole process above took 5-10 minutes instead of 5 days, and not only did the organization save time, money and sometimes frustration, but business decisions can be made quicker as a result of the automated self-service reporting, the drill down and drill across to sub-ledger detail and the comment feedback that could be stored for later retrieval.

Modern tools like Solver’s BI360 business intelligence suite can provide the full automation and self- service reporting that was described in the above example.

Get Ready for BI360 version 3.5!
It is currently in beta and will be released in January 2012. Benefit from new features added within the reporting, planning and data warehouse modules.

Two major features were added to enhance reporting and analysis:
• Custom drill down within your reports allowing users to drill through to any module and detail in the ERP database or BI360 data warehouse
• Meta Light tool -friendly interface allows you to expose custom and 3rd party tables/fields in your ERP database to the BI360 report writer.