Is there a way to automatically send month end Financials to upper management in a PDF form? Kind of like the report binder but where they don’t have to go in and change the pages to the current month/company/cost center. Just trying to figure out the easiest way to get reports to executives.
Thank you.
Hi Natalia,
Maybe I’m off track with understanding what you’re trying to accomplish here, but we have a whole library of monthly reports (and corresponding report binders) that are “executive-ready”… nobody edits these.
Each report points to the named set “Current Month” so we never have to touch, we just publish report binders once books are closed. We’ve even created a process to run all executive report binders at once… no need to click a button twice.
After executive reports are published, we roll the named set “Current Month” forward to the next month. If anyone needs to go back in time, they can either refer to past pdf’s or they can contact us to roll back the “Current Month” to some other date, for a minute.
If our executives were constantly going back in time, we could copy all our “executive-ready” reports to create another set that does NOT point to “Current Month.” But, our executives rarely look back. Therefore, so far, we’ve only needed the “Current Month” set for them.
Does this help?
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I think our issue is that we have multiple companies and cost centers. So the executives need to go to the pages to update what company they are looking at as well as the cost centers. I would like to create a binder that has everything ready for them already. And As I am typing this I am wondering can I select the Company and cost center and save them all individually to the Report binder. I am not sure if this even makes sense. I have the income statement and I look at 5 different companies but also look at all the individual cost centers.
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Hi there,
Yes, it makes sense. We have multiple companies, each with multiple locations, and each with multiple formats combined into unique sets of reports depending upon who is needing them… execs, operations, and/or admin. We have all those reports individually pre-saved and ready so that the executives simply need to pick which sets (binders) or reports they want. Our feeling was that “I” can prepare them once. This means that executives are saved from doing it over and over again.
And, once prepared, there is little chance for error in format or selection.
Again, nobody edits these!!
Once created, they are always at the ready.
Good luck!
Best regards,
CL
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Thanks for submitting such detailed responses, CL.
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We do the same! I would also suggest Named Sets or an alternative hierarchy if you want to more dynamically have separate packages for each of your executives. For example, we have an alternative hierarchy where all of “VP 1’s” departments roll up to her. In our automated reporting we can then give her the ability to see the node “VP 1” with all of her departments added together or she can flip through the pages to see them in more detail.
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We also use the named sets and alternate hierarchies, but we are just now transitioning to using report binders for our E-Team
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We use named-sets heavily to make reports dynamic. It is a great way to have multiple reports change in one location i.e. “Current Month”. Alternate hierarchies are also a great option but are limited to 1 level.
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I think you can create cost centre rollup hierarchy as companies then create report based on hierarchy. Create a process Generate report binder.
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I would like to learn more about using alternate hierarchies. We only have one set up for our year-end consolidation (monthly consolidations exclude a certain company). But I have no idea how this is helping y’all with binders/reporting.
We also use “current month” in all of our reports so there’s no extra work each month getting reports to execs.
I would agree with all of these. Alternate hierarchy, named sets, and also look at security settings. If they only need to view a certain set of data then have their security settings set up that way.
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Hi CL,
I’d be happy to chat about alternate hierarchies - they’re relatively simple to set up once you grasp the concept and can be an immense help if you need to report in multiple ways. A common example would be needing to report by region in addition to a consolidated company report.
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Thank you, Ashraf! I think that would be great! I’ll go ahead and ask Scott to set up some time for us in the next few weeks, if you’re both available, if that’s OK. Thanks again!
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I’ll shoot him a note now!