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My ideal monthly management pack: Graham Wylie

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24th Jun 2006
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As part of a series of articles exploring the principles of good management reporting, AccountingWEB asked Sage founder Graham Wylie (now chairman of TSG) about what he looks for in a monthly management pack.

Our survey will include experts such as Alchemy Partners chairman Jon Moulton, who reviews more than 40 sets of management accounts each month and AccountingWEB contributing editor (and SME consultant) Richard Murphy. We will also enlist the help of gurus at the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, who have produced several detailed reports on this subject.

No AccountingWEB survey of this kind would be complete without community input. As well as asking well known figures for their views on the subject, we would like to hear your opinions - so feel free to add a comment at the end of this article. When the series is complete, we will boil down all of the responses to see if we can come up with an AccountingWEB standard for monthly management reporting.

Graham Wylie, Technology Services Group
Sage founder Graham Wylie subscribes to Jon Moulton's "keep it simple" reporting philosophy. Having learned the disciplines of working within a quoted company, Wylie applied them to his new company TSG when he left Sage. In common with Moulton, Wylie has to rely on management information generated by the wide variety of accounting systems used within the 11 regional subsidiaries TSG has acquired since 2003.

Wylie and his management team spend less time worrying about technology and more about tracking where value lies in the organisation and whether the regional divisions are winning new customers. The information collected by the TSG group management team is collated on spreadsheets showing monthly revenues by region and product line, with comparisons against monthly and quarterly budgets.

"I just want a top-level view," saysWylie. "We know what we want to know and each region submits a monthly pack. We rely on the regions to provide us with accurate information and we'll work things like margins out."

Wylie looks at the monthly product P&Ls to see whether his regional divisions are maintaining a balanced mix of between TSG's profitable SystemCare service and sales of Sage, Pegasus and IRIS Enterprise accounting systems.

Wylie and the TSG group managers use the monthly information pack as a barometer rather than a definitive guide and put a lot of emphasis on face to face meetings with regional managers to understand the shape of the numbers.

"I look at sales of a particular product to see if sales margins might have a better gross margin in one region than another. That sort of thing that provokes discussions - and perhaps getting the managing directors in other regions to think about changes they could make."

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    Jon Moulton and Graham Wylie could be considered as "power users" of management reports. Do their observations match your experiences? And what are your key principles for successful monthly reports?

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