While many companies have already entered the new world of e-reporting, there is still no financial reporting product that enables businesses to reap the full range of e-reporting benefits. But in a few years, paper reports will surely go the way of the dinosaurs. Understanding four key aspects of e-reporting can put you at the forefront.

The impact of the Web, electronic mail and workflow is raising financial executives’ expectations of financial reporting applications. As a result, a new electronic-reporting (e-reporting) technology architecture is emerging to manage the reporting process wholly electronically. E-reporting reduces administration, cuts out paper and makes reports available on demand and in more useful formats to a wider organizational audience.

In the past, reporting applications required users to request reports manually or to ask information system (IS) staff to include reports in overnight job runs. Today, new report initiation options using report schedulers and event-driven reporting are reducing reporting administration and delivering more timely information. For faster performance, reports are more likely to be produced from specially designed reporting datamart databases rather than from transaction processing systems. Access to reports is getting easier and becoming available to more people through the use of online report libraries and electronic report distribution. And paper printouts are now just one of many ways to publish, view and analyze reporting data.

E-reporting is not a product. E-reporting is a way of leveraging technology to transform a time-consuming chore into a more proactive and less paper-intensive automated business process.

The four key aspects of e-reporting include: report initiation, reporting infrastructure, report library management, and report viewing and publishing.

1.
Report Initiation
Today, obtaining a financial report is largely a manual task initiated by the person who needs the information. Often, a manager requests a copy via an on-screen request form. This form asks the user to select the data to include, and after it’s compiled, the finance manager prints a copy of the final report. Because managers generally know how often they need reports and what data should be included, the redundant task of inputting requests and printing reports wastes time, effort and paper. There may always be a need for one-off report request capability, but most of this process can be automated.

Reporting can be automated in two ways: by creating reports according to a schedule or by generating reports in response to predefined business events. The first, automated report scheduling, is easy to find among accounting packages, including those that use third-party report writers such as Seagate Info (formerly Crystal Reports) or FRx Visual Financial Reporting. However, business-event-driven reporting, a key aspect of e-reporting, is harder to find and requires role-, rule- and route-based workflow capability — an option that is seldom provided unless the accounting suite includes a workflow module. Automatically generating and distributing reports requires the ability to save report-request parameters for reuse, to store electronic report distribution lists and to codify the business and fiscal calendar events that trigger report production.

2.
Reporting Infrastructure
Once the system begins generating reports automatically, reporting activity patterns will change. Ad hoc report requests should decrease; however, the load on reporting servers will increase during peak periods, such as the end of a day, week or month. That’s why a more sophisticated reporting technology infrastructure is needed, especially by larger businesses. A middle-tier architecture of one or more reporting servers that can balance the demand for report-request processing across multiple server resources is necessary. Also, data sources for the reports should not be the main accounting transaction database but one or more specialized databases acting as reporting datamarts or data warehouses. These datamarts, in turn, may make use of the transaction database, but only as the eventual destination for any drilldown activity from an online report.

Already, more and more accounting vendors are recognizing the need to maintain decision-support datamarts with their transaction databases. This speeds up reporting performance by reducing the burden on transaction servers caused by costly decision-support queries. For e-reporting to work efficiently, the infrastructure must allow for report requests to be managed by multiple report servers and for those requests to be routed either to datamarts or transaction databases depending on the content profile of the report. Few financial reporting systems can do this kind of routing transparently on a report-by-report basis.