With a good business management solution that manages your finances and operations all in one system, you can gain company-wide visibility into your business so you know where you’ve been, where you are currently and where you will end up in terms of cash spent, time and schedule commitments met. In addition, you can keep score on the performance and health of your business.
This is possible through ensuring that you have a decent reporting solution integrated into your business management solution. This is how it should look and what the key characteristics are:
Real-time reporting
Your business can’t wait for data synchronization. You need information about your business in real-time, so you can respond quickly and address issues before they become major problems. Once data is entered by an employee, your entire company should have access to that information immediately.
Standard and custom reporting
Many businesses need similar information about their accounting and operations. Therefore, your business management solution should be integrated with a reporting solution that offers a standard set of reports you can leverage for your business out of the box. This will not only save you money and time incurred to create custom reports, but It will also enable you to leverage proven and trusted standard reports used by thousands of companies just like yours.
At the same time, every business has its own specific needs. You should be able to customize reports to give you the information you need to spot problems and identify positive trends in your business. Instead of hiring an outside expert to customize your reports, you now have the freedom to keep the task in-house.
Integrated with operational information
As an executive, you typically have worker productivity at the top of your mind. If your employees are spending excessive time on duplicate data entry, cutting and pasting data, and back-and-forth communication with operational departments, that’s money lost. Integration between your operations and accounting functions eliminates the bottlenecks. Your main business management solution should be capable of tracking orders to production to inventory to shipping to billing with as little human intervention as possible.
With a narrow view, you’re unable to fully understand what’s behind the door of your business and what might be lurking around the corner. Likewise, with insufficient reporting on financial and operational details, you are forced to make critical decisions on the basis of only a small portion of the information. Check out this guide on business reporting and what to look out for, and ensure that you’re on beat with the beating heart of your business.
