An automated end-to-end board reporting system will help the board of directors organize the company as a single mechanism and establish effective cross-functional interaction within it. Here is more about it.
What is the purpose of the board reporting system?
To ensure effective planning, an enterprise needs not only data on its operations but also information on the state of the external environment, primarily on markets, industry development trends, and the state of affairs of competitors. The monitoring function provides the collection and compilation of such information. Based on accounting and monitoring data, control and analysis procedures are formed that allow collegial bodies to identify deviations, analyze their causes and, as a result, develop an information base for making management decisions. Thus, the functions of accounting, corporate reporting, external monitoring, and economic analysis should be an integral system, the effectiveness of which is determined both by the content (relevance of information) and the form (comparability and clarity of presentation).
Another reason lies in the plane of information support: in large companies, as a rule, disparate reporting systems that are not interconnected are used. In these systems, directories are duplicated, and data is stored in different formats. Therefore, creating a unified reporting information system is necessary to improve the state of affairs in this subject area.
The reporting system should be understood as an ordered system for collecting, registering, storing, summarizing, and presenting information about the current state of the enterprise, its operations, and performance results. Here the leading role is played by reporting, which is kept in financial terms, although other types of accounting, for example, material and personnel, should not be underestimated.
Board software for transparent reporting
Currently, board members and committees have direct and permanent access to the materials of the board of directors meetings through a unique electronic system – board software. This system also serves as an electronic archive of documents of meetings of the boards to ensure convenient access to them by all members. Another purpose is to conduct electronic voting on agenda items and manage reports. The software provides reports on the execution of controlled documents and the performance discipline of the company’s employees.
End-to-end board reporting implies a preliminary collection of planning and accounting information “on the ground”, its filtering, processing, and formation in a form convenient for perception and delivery to experts and managers for subsequent analysis and key decision-making. The board portal offers a modern self-service reporting environment that allows the board members to drag and drop to create and edit any report imaginable. The board interface allows the user to use any board object (graphs, cockpits, tables) as a starting point for analysis and to control filters easily, sorting, and alarms to work intuitively with the data. The comprehensive integration into the Microsoft Office environment enables users to perform analyzes directly from Excel and create Word documents and PowerPoint presentations based on board objects. The direct connection to the board database ensures the most up-to-date data.
The board software as a reliable reporting system has many advantages:
- informative and wide coverage of each stage of the project;
- corporate information space;
- a single mechanism for collecting, processing, and storing information;
- a single analytical data processing center;
- exclusion of duplicating functions in the collection, processing, and provision of information;
- reduction of data acquisition time;
- access of ordinary specialists to “their” segment in the corporate data warehouse;
- optimal detailing of reports for specialists of individual departments – elimination of unnecessary information and analytics.