Preparing and analyzing financial statements are always challenging and labor intensive tasks. Senior management expect financial statements to be on-time, accurate and adequate, to be able to steer the business or spot problem trends before they arise. The timeliness and accuracy of this information are indisputable. What are the ways to achieve it?

Some QAD users do manual reporting. Every month analysts manually pull QAD reports from the system and compile Excel workbook with summary/detail pages, then distribute it to the management. This approach does not require any additional software, but labor intensive, someone needs to be trained on “what to do and how to do it”. The accuracy is questionable since human efforts are involved in the process every time.

Some other QAD users implement external 3rd party financial reporting solutions, such as Oracle Hyperion, MS SQL, Cognos, etc… These solutions are powerful and flexible, however you will not necessarily win, because :

• High license cost and high cost of the ownership. The package you buy is overkill. Most likely you will be using only a small portion of the package.
  You have to invest into training on these products, because of their complexities. New staff should be trained every time. Both technical and user teams should be trained.
• Additional burden for IT. Since it’s external software, IT have to make sure the data synchronization is working properly. Any changes in QAD may cause data integrity issues, discrepancies, which in turn require additional resources to correct the data flow.
• Complicated in use. Finance may not be able to create/change reports themselves, need help from IT. Here is some feedback: “…Hyperion that we have in place is so complicated, so none of us knows how exactly it works…”

Many users exploit QAD’s GL Report Writer Module. Pros: Integrated Core QAD module. Data discrepancies eliminated by QAD design. No extra cost to you, because you already own it. Designed for finance end users, they can maintain reports themselves. Ease of upgrade to next versions of QAD. No additional burden to IT. Cons: cumbersome in use, report output is not friendly, no drill downs to perform analysis. You have to manually run 25.21 menu to sync data.

What would be the characteristics of the optimal financial reporting solution?

• Must serve needs of 3 groups:
  – Senior management to be able to steer the business via real-time financial performance visibility and with drill down intelligence.
  – Mid level management are able to track actual spending versus budget
  – Financial users are able to perform financial planning and analysis
• Must have executive quality user interface, clear and simple in use.
• Must deliver accurate, up-to-date reliable information automatically.
• Should run in autopilot mode with no burden to busy IT department.
• Finance department should be able to create/change reports without help from IT
• Multiple views MTD/QTD/YTD/LYTD; total business or individual product lines
• Analytical capabilities, drill down to lower account levels, transactional levels and sub ledger documents. To be able to reveal cost drivers
• Security to control access to sensitive information
• Reasonable acquisition and ownership cost
• Can be easily migrated to next versions of QAD ERP.

Our Financial Business Intelligence solution is implementation of the requirements listed above. It is based on GL Report Writer Module.

No additional hardware or software required. Please contact us to book online demo.

If you maintain GL budget outside of QAD system, you may consider acquiring Excel Budget Loader module from us. More details are here. Excel based tool which allows you quickly and accurately maintain budget: download last year budget from the system to the spreadsheet, make changes and upload it back for the new year. Or copy-paste large blocks of budget data from another sheet and upload to QAD. The loader has built-in instant validation of the budget information.
Contact us for more information or book online demo.
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