The ‘simply smarter’ way to run your practice - smarter financial reporting

The fundamental way the profession works is being re-shaped by new compliance regimes, globalisation and frameworks to recover losses and minimise risk. The new ‘normal’ calls for greater efficiency  – let’s call it smarter working, built on technology innovations that enable firms to simultaneously drive cost savings, improve productivity and handle compliance.
The introduction of iXBRL has sparked a major re-write of final accounts and financial reporting systems. Practices  now have more choice than ever and more ways to slice and dice financial data.
Within the systems breaking new ground there is a marked shift to incorporate broader reporting and to allow the creation of reports from more data sources including csv files. Users can import transactions using a ‘drag and drop’ configuration which can be saved and re-used providing far greater flexibility, meaning that there is less manual formatting required to source data - saving employees valuable time.
It is the ability to create and manipulate personalised reports from a reporting template that take these tools to another level. With existing accounts production systems, the practice is typically forced down the software developer’s preferred route for report production without any opportunity to personalise. Further, they may also be required to pay for additional modules to allow specialist reports to be run. But with the new reporting template feature in today’s ‘smarter’ systems, the accountant can choose how to represent the client’s financial information with the chance for greater control over formatting, character sets and capitalising.
iXBRL represents an enormous change for the accounting profession, but it is also an opportunity to take advantage of productivity - boosting tagging tools, without having to export to a Word file. Migrating data is no longer the issue it once was and today’s conversion routines allow the successful export of multiple years of data with very little need to re-key.
The Government, banks and board members drive the need for financial reporting, but the real value to the practice is in the use of the information and metrics provided to help clients to make the kind of critical business decisions needed in 2011.
 

Simply smarter practice software from Digita, part of the Tax & Accounting business of Thomson Reuters - www.digita.com