Skip to main content

Looking Beyond Regulatory Reporting

By

The advent of XBRL has undoubtedly introduced an exciting era in the world of Business Reporting. The ultimate goal of XBRL is to enable speedy and efficient access to information, improve corporate communication with stakeholders and most importantly reduce enterprise risk by accurate consolidation and analysis of data. However, as it stands today XBRL is mostly limited to regulatory reporting.  This is understandable, because most technology tools were developed as a response to regulatory diktats.
While most companies in the initial XBRL adoption phase have looked it from a purely tactical perspective, they should gradually plan to broaden the scope of their XBRL initiative by making the under-lying source systems XBRL aware. By doing this, companies can generate different types of reports and dashboards and enable interaction among disparate applications and systems.  Using XBRL as an enterprise wide strategic tool will eliminate manual collation of data, stream-line processes, remove manual errors and automate validations.
ERP systems to some extent enjoy an advantage of housing the source data, and thereby making it easier to drive automated XBRL reporting from source systems. While it sounds like the solution to the strategic direction companies should take, it is not so straightforward. According to a research conducted by the Aberdeen Group (March 2012), adoption rates of ERP financial management solutions are going down rather than going up (32% in 2012 compared to 44% in 2011). As per the report, this indicates a general trend where more companies, particularly in the finance space, are now seeking niche solutions over a general ERP solution to achieve greater level of details/capabilities.
What this indicates is that there continues to be an urgent need for niche solutions that can completely leverage the power of XBRL not just for regulatory reporting, but take it to the next stage for consolidation, analytics, custom reporting etc. The array of technology products in the market today belong to either of two extreme spectrums. At one end are high-quality desktop solutions for XBRL conversion. While they do a commendable job of conversion, they do just that and nothing more. On the other end are ERP financial management systems that are too broad based (and expensive), and are not geared to provide to the specialised requirements that a niche solution can provide.
New perspectives have to emerge to leverage the power of XBRL. The BeyondWalls BRC Suite from Beyond Square is an attempt to bridge that gap. How it does it is the subject of another blog.

Karthik Ganeshan (karthik.ganeshan@beyondsquare.com)
Director, Beyond Square Solutions
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

FinAlyzer, a flagship product of BeyondSquare Solutions, was featured on My Startup TV, India’s first channel for Startups.

By
We are glad to share that FinAlyzer, a flagship platform of BeyondSquare Solutions was selected by NASSCOM, among the Top 50 Startups and MSMEs for its first global virtual event NASTech 2020. Karthik Ganeshan, Director & Co-Founder of BeyondSquare Solutions featured in My Startup TV, India’s first channel for Startups. As stated by Karthik Ganeshan, he and his partners who are all ex-Infoscions had a deep desire to contribute to the Digital Transformation and thus co-founded BeyondSquare Solutions. FinAlyzer is a unified digital platform for Financial Consolidation, Close, Analytics, and Management Reporting. FinAlyzer is a key catalyst driving Digital Transformation for all the CFOs across industry segments. We are grateful to Major Sunil Shetty (My Startup TV) for hosting us on its media channel and the NASSCOM team who provided us a platform to showcase FinAlyzer.
Post a Comment
Read more

Top 5 Financial KPIs for the CXO

By
Let’s say you got up this morning with a headache. You know from experience that it’s a small niggle, and it will go away on its own. But what if you got up tomorrow morning, and the headache got worse? If an aspirin doesn't help, you will surely go to a doctor, and most likely get some diagnostic checks done. A KPI (key performance indicators) dashboard is like a diagnostics report of various parameters that reflect the health of your business. KPI’s help you measure your business’s financial health. You can define KPIs for different areas of your business, from HR, Finance, Marketing to Operations. You can combine these KPIs to arrive at an overall health for your business. The Finance function is like the blood flowing through your body; it affects each part of it and keeps it healthy and oxygenated. Similarly, your company’s financial performance has a direct impact on every aspect of your business. Remember, that KPI’s and dashboards are not just for CFO’s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Top 3 Trends in Financial Planning, Analysis & Reporting

By
The main purpose of Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) teams is to drive execution of the organizational strategy. They start from where the accounting team stops. These teams focus on what may happen in the future, by using data from the past, make assumptions and explain variances to the forecast so that management can maximize value creation and take better decisions. The FP&A teams support the finance controllers by turning information into knowledge, and knowledge into actionable insights. They are less focused on day to day transaction processing and more focused on forward-looking analysis for the business. With the speed and complexity of businesses constantly increasing, the prominence of FP&A teams has vastly increased. Apart from doing the budget, FP&A answers strategic questions, forecasts for the future, ensures a timely accounting close, prepares board reporting packages, preps the executive team, divests a division, analyzes product line prof...
Post a Comment
Read more