Here at FYIsoft, our purpose and mission is to provide solutions that leverage the latest technology to streamline reporting and FP&A processes to deliver an impressive ROI for customers, empowering the CFO to make faster and better strategic decisions. Our desire to continuously enhance ROI manifests in the design of almost every function within our product suite.

This passion leads to great conversations and reflection on our solutions vs. our competition. Sadly, many companies still continue to shore up the lack of adaptable Financial Reporting capabilities within their native ERP systems by using Microsoft Excel. Our conversation with the CFO of one of those companies led to a great opportunity for us to highlight a few of our ReportFYI capabilities – and to blow away their current processes. We’re always down for challenge.

When we think about ROI, it’s easiest to define as a ‘performance measure with which to evaluate the profitability of an investment’. CFOs live and die by the ethos of evaluation and comparison of a myriad of choices of internal investment.

The continuing maturity of Chart of Accounts (adding purposeful and specific GL accounts) is helping organizations to achieve better insight and better manage expenses. For example, in 2021, many companies are building out additional T&E accounts to isolate new and more prevalent travel expenses. Recently, change and baggage fees are becoming more frequent with US domestic airlines. The old adage ‘what gets measured gets managed’ is coming into play as organizations are now breaking out these specific costs via unique GL accounts.

In talking to the CFO, she shared that she suddenly found herself out of sync with the General Ledger net income when using pre-existing Excel templates. This difference perplexed the Accounting Operations team. A manual line by line check across the entire chart of accounts (86 P&L accounts) took almost 30 minutes, ultimately with the discovery of two ‘new’ active T&E Accounts (6418 Travel Expense – Ticket Changes & 6419 Travel Expense – Baggage Fees).  As referenced earlier, these new travel accounts caused the disconnect. Clearly the lack of coordination in adding the accounts drove the difference.

So, 30+ minutes burned…. but now the real work started. Finance & Accounting produced eight individual P&Ls for different divisions (unique to their operations), thus eight formats. Each P&L had an average 23 tabs to report on departments. So, the addition of these two accounts had to be manually changed across 184 worksheets. This took approximately 2.5 hours (including updating validation formulas).

Three hours burned due to trying to report with Excel in an ever-changing environment. Jump to an alternative universe. FYIsoft.

Problem statement redux: Net Income out of sync with GL in ReportFYI.

1. Single click ‘audit components’ on Row definition
2. Missed GL accounts flagged immediately via the embedded bot.
3. Row definition updated (add new row and two GL accounts) in approximately 30 seconds.
4. Done. All reports using row definitions automatically update = Net Income ties out.

Three hours vs…. let’s say 90 seconds. Simple solution.

This is but one example that drives ‘off the chart’ ROI for our product suite.

Stay tuned for more stories.