Wondering how to prepare financial statements speedily and well at the same time?
Accelerating financial reporting empowers financial professionals to focus time and energy on more value-adding, strategic tasks.
Here’s the thing: Quality can never be sacrificed for efficiency. Your reports need to be accurate and trustworthy if they will be of value to you and your finance team.
We’ve got you covered. Here, we’ll outline five tips and best practices to help your organization speed up the time it takes to issue efficient, high-quality financial statements.
1. Make a Plan and Get Everyone Onboard
Accounting departments can be limited by tradition and a pervasive mindset of "this is the way it’s always been done.”
Change can be difficult, but it may be beneficial. If long-standing habits have plagued your finance team with burnout and dread around closing the books, it’s time to develop a new plan and get buy-in from your team. Introducing a new way of preparing financial reports allows your accounting team to adjust or even overhaul day-to-day financial operations and embrace a more efficient process.
Here’s what we would recommend:
- Start by creating a detailed list of tasks that must be completed to prepare your financial statements.
- Work backward from previous years and review the action items and priority levels for each step taken to issue your financial statements in the past. Be sure to include key dates, assign a team member to each task, and communicate expectations with your entire team.
- Practice good change management habits and get the entire finance and accounting team on the same page. If you want to issue financial statements faster, every team member must understand the goal and have clear expectations of their role and responsibilities.
2. Collaborate Effectively
Even with accounting technology and expansive spreadsheets, financial data can be scattered among people or document storage silos, forcing accountants to contact dozens of contributors and meticulously hunt down the most up-to-date version of the needed file. (This is a major reason end-of-year reporting can take weeks or months to finalize.)
When all financial data and underlying documents exist within a single data warehouse and all contributors have access to that data repository, reporting can take a fraction of the time. Establishing a single source of truth allows accountants to feel more confident using the data in their reporting, knowing they’re using the most accurate and up-to-date information.
3. Empower Your Team with Purpose-Built Tools
End-of-year financial statements often consist of dozens of smaller, detailed financial reports and analyses. The entire team should be able to share reporting responsibilities and have access to the tools they need to create reports customized with whatever data or visualizations they need. Self-service reporting functionality means cutting dependency on other departments and eliminating the time-consuming back-and-forth of emails and documents.
The single best way to speed up financial reporting is with a purpose-built tool. Technology solutions that enable self-service reporting can kick the reporting process into high gear and give your organization new abilities in terms of financial foresight and flexibility.
4. Simplify Data Analysis
Accountants must invest hours collecting, integrating, and analyzing data.
Utilizing a powerful data warehouse can drastically reduce the time it takes to collect and analyze that information, resulting in faster reporting and analysis. When data and documents are stored in a central hub, they are quickly and easily accessible.
Further, dashboards offer fast and intuitive ways to visualize data, with the ability to easily categorize, organize, and manipulate datasets. Journal entries, amortization schedules, and projections can all be calculated in a fraction of the time when the financial data is stored in a centralized repository.
5. Automate as Much as Possible
When the end of the fiscal year is looming, it can feel overwhelming to prepare accurate financial reports under tight deadlines, time constraints, and even impending holidays.
When you rely on manual processes, human error is inevitable.
But when you can automate your reporting processes, you reduce the risk of error that arises from incorrect data entry, copy/paste mistakes, or even changes to source or destination file formats that produce unexpected and erroneous results. When you don’t have to dedicate dozens of hours reviewing and correcting reports, you can issue your financial statements faster.
Figuring Out How to Prepare Financial Statements? DebtBook Can Help
DebtBook makes powerful, easy-to-use, cloud-based debt and lease management software for government, higher education, and healthcare finance teams.
Our software enables finance teams to issue better financial statements faster by providing a single source of truth where all team members and external contributors can access, analyze, and extract data and source documents.
DebtBook provides tools to automate year-end reporting with the ability to export audit-ready notes, amortization schedules, payment history, and data visualizations in seconds. Click here to learn how DebtBook can help you reduce the time and stress it takes to prepare financial reports — request a demo today!
Disclaimer: DebtBook does not provide professional services or advice. DebtBook has prepared these materials for general informational and educational purposes, meaning we have not tailored the information to your specific circumstances. Please consult your professional advisors before taking action based on any information in these materials. Any use of this information is solely at your own risk.
