Discover how to choose the best automated reporting software — from risk assessment to evaluating your shortlist — and increase efficiency across your whole firm.
Everything You Need to Know About Automated Reporting in Finance
Automated reporting is a game changer for front-line financial services teams.
But how do you know which solution is the best fit for your business?
What Are Automated Reporting Tools?
Automated financial reporting tools are designed specifically to streamline your reporting process.
The value of these tools is their ability to remove the manual labor involved in data compilation and presentation, empowering you and your teams to spend more time on commentary and analysis.
How Do Finance Teams Use Automated Reporting?
Financial services teams are constantly seeking more efficient ways to boost productivity when building recurring reports. In an industry where 23% of workers are struggling to spend more time on strategic tasks, automated reporting in finance is more important than ever.
There are numerous ways finance teams use reporting automation to enhance their workflows. Within the industry, a reporting automation tool can help teams:
- Export and link data from Excel to PowerPoint.
- Refresh up to thousands of data points in one click.
- Automate table and chart formatting within Excel workbooks.
- Structure your final report in PowerPoint or Word.
And the use case can vary within different verticals:
- Accounting and advisory teams typically require reporting automation to gather operational data for profit and loss statements.
- Investment banking teams require reporting automation tools to export market data from Bloomberg or other data providers to their pitchbooks.
- Private equity teams leverage automated reporting software to collate data from companies’ financial statements for investment memorandums.
The Benefits of Automated Reporting
After implementing automation solutions across their workstreams, financial services firms can expect these benefits:
Maximized Time Efficiency
Repetitive tasks, such as exporting market data from Bloomberg or LSEG Data & Analytics, often take hours, especially when market data is frequently changing. By automating these tasks, reporting teams free up valuable time to focus on strategic initiatives, rather than data exports alone.
Airtight Report Accuracy
When dealing with thousands of data points per report, relying on software rather than manual input is a surefire way to reduce human error and ensure all the relevant data in the final report is accurate.
Guaranteed Formatting Consistency
Formatting is another time-consuming task for many financial reporting teams, with 90% of them spending over two hours in PowerPoint each day on this manual work. Trusting a reporting automation tool to handle this ensures consistent formatting across the entire team, reducing the amount of time spent on proofing and correcting poorly formatted tables, charts, and slides.
Reduced Pressure on Employees
Many financial and professional services firms are striving to reduce headcount while maintaining efficiency and output. However, this increases the workload for remaining employees, forcing them to do more with less. Automated reporting software relieves low-headcount teams of manual, time-consuming tasks, enabling them to deliver high-quality output more effectively.
So, how can you roll out reporting technology across your business and reap the benefits we’ve described above?
How to Choose the Best Financial Reporting Automation Software
Let’s walk through how to choose the best tool for you and your team.
Step 1: Evaluate Your Existing Reporting Process
To transform your firm’s reporting processes, start by assessing existing workflows.
Find out how efficient the regular reporting is currently, and if the final deliverables are always accurate. Analyzing these factors will identify your team’s bottlenecks and uncover pain points that you can solve with automation.
Identify Existing Inefficiencies
- Perform a deep dive into the steps involved in creating financial reports currently. Send out a survey or talk to team members directly to understand their processes and gather any feedback.
- Determine the total number of hours spent on data entry, exporting, and carrying out calculations manually. Again, asking team members directly can help with this, or consult any time-tracking data from your project management software like Slack or Monday.
- Pay special attention to any repeated actions in your reporting workflow, for example, updating data several times in PowerPoint after it changes in Excel. Identifying these as early as possible will indicate where your reporting process should be automated.
Investigate the Data Accuracy of the Current Process
Let’s now look at the accuracy of your team’s current reporting. Data accuracy safeguards all financial services companies against legal and financial risk. When building valuation reports, or reporting on portfolio updates, small inaccuracies can lead to significant impacts on a company’s reputation upon audit inspection.
Assess the accuracy within your financial reporting processes, by:
- Investigate frequent errors encountered during manual data exports and updates. Identifying any consistent cause for these errors will help pinpoint areas where a financial reporting tool could help.
- Consider how many multi-tiered reviews are required before certifying a report as accurate. If you’re spending too much time or involving too many people during these reviews, it’s time to explore a solution to automate the proofing process, such as a slide checking tool.
Before using UpSlide, most of our clients would spend close to a week reviewing their final reports. UpSlide’s automated reporting tools provide a failsafe for data accuracy, freeing up a significant amount of capacity in these workflows.
Step 2: Create a Shortlist of Tools
It’s time to determine which reporting solution best suits your organization’s needs. We recommend exploring online case studies and reviews to compare how tools perform in real-world scenarios.
Evaluate Your Shortlist
Once you’ve built your shortlist of tools, evaluate against these five qualities:
- User-friendliness: The best reporting tools can become redundant if they require specialized IT knowledge to operate. A top-tier solution should be easy to adopt thanks to its intuitive design and simplicity.
- Customization: Could your team benefit from a tool that’s customized to your processes and brand guidelines. It may lead to greater adoption of the tool within your team and higher ROI in the future.
- Scalability: The software must be scalable to growing teams and workloads, to ensure it meets long-term future demands.
- Security: Ensure you choose a reporting solution that is compliant with current industry regulation such as SOC2, the GLBA (in the USA), or DORA (in the EU). Your chosen tool should retain zero visibility of your data, leaving you with full control.
- Support: Good customer service can make or break any product experience — especially in high-stakes industries like finance that demand rapid support response.
After you’ve defined these criteria for your search, it’s time to choose a tool!
Top tip
When it comes to automated reporting in finance, adoption support is crucial to ensuring long-term ROI. A provider that offers specialized training sessions or onboarding plans for employees will help your team see more consistent results down the line.
Step 3: Identify the Best Automated Reporting Tool for Your Team
It’s now time to assess which tools are on the market. Take the findings from step one, the criteria from step two, and see which tools are out there that satisfy your team’s requirements. Review sites like G2 or Capterra are invaluable at this stage.
You should now know which stage of the financial reporting process you want to automate. Is it the data extraction, the report generation, or the analysis itself? Solutions differ widely in their strengths and scopes; some might excel in data visualization but lack robust integration abilities or vice versa.
External Data Extraction and Transformation
If your team are spending too much time on data extraction and transformation, consider an ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) solution like Power Query or Oracle Data Integrator (ODI).
Internal Data Linking
If you regularly collate information from multiple internal documents to build your reports, consider leveraging a digital asset management (DAM) platform such as iManage or Bynder.
Or, if you frequently have to link data from Excel to PowerPoint, UpSlide offers a comprehensive service tailored to financial services teams building recurring reports in Microsoft 365.
Formatting and Report Finalization
UpSlide’s reporting automation functionality goes well beyond just the data. Whether it’s streamlining the design of every Excel table and chart your team builds, or ensuring your final slides are formatted to precision.
Top tip
Remember that technical compatibility matters more than a flashy interface. If your team largely report out of Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, it’s best to choose an approved provider for each platform.
Step 4: Gather Feedback
Employee buy-in goes a long way toward the successful adoption of a new tool. Gather feedback from your teams and measure their confidence in the automated financial reporting software as part of your evaluation.
If you reach the end of the test period and everything has gone well – great! If not, share this feedback with your provider and explore opportunities for improvement.
Collecting both qualitative and quantitative feedback from our clients helps us understand both the impact on their productivity, but also how we can optimize our financial reporting automation solution to cater to the needs of finance teams.
How UpSlide Automates Report Creation for Finance Teams
How BNP Paribas Transforms Their Productivity with Reporting Automation
The International Financial Services (IFS) function within BNP Paribas produce regular reports throughout the financial year to forecast and interpret figures, focusing on budgets, estimations and final outcomes.
Once a labor-intensive process, the team has now freed up significant capacity when it comes to exporting data from Excel to their financial reports in PowerPoint.
How American Tower Leverages Automated Financial Reporting Software for Their FP&A Team
American Tower’s FP&A team spend a significant amount of time in Microsoft 365 producing regular reports on earnings, forecasting, budgeting and more. The team identified the risk and inefficiency of relying on manual work in the financial reporting process, as well as the impact it was having on employee wellbeing.
Now, they save over 17 hours per employee per month with UpSlide’s financial reporting automation software, while also guaranteeing both the quality and the accuracy of all deliverables.
Ensuring quality control and data accuracy used to take the team hours. Now we just UpSlide our reports, giving us full peace of mind before we share to senior leadership.
Key Takeaways: What Is the Best Automated Financial Reporting Software?
Deciphering which automated financial reporting software is best for your team can be challenging.
If you rely on a range of internal resources to build financial reports, then a DAM solution like Bynder is ideal. If, however, your team wants to centralize their reporting automation under an all-in-one solution – from data linking to content management and report formatting – consider UpSlide.
TL;DR
Automated reporting in finance serves to boost productivity and spare employees from manual work involved in data compilation and presentation.
Choosing the best reporting software requires understanding team’s current pain points, shortlisting tools, and using review sites to aid your final decision.
Discover how financial reporting teams in BNP Paribas and American Tower are using reporting automation software to boost productivity.
Some of the best reporting automation tools are: Oracle Data Integrator, Bynder, and UpSlide – the preferred solution for financial services professionals.
