Improve Organizational Insight: Get the Whole Picture of Your CAFR Process

You know the phrase, “You can’t see the forest for the trees?” That’s the state you’re in when you are so immersed in small details that you can’t see the whole picture.  And when you can’t see the whole picture of your organization, you’re going to miss out on a lot of critical information.

If you use a manual process to produce your Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR), then you aren’t absorbed in just the trees. You’re peering with your nose pressed against tree bark as you hurriedly comb through the minutiae of report building, editing, reviewing, approving, and publishing.  You might not know if you’re even in a forest anymore – and that’s not good for your organization.

Fortunately, we know how to help you see the forest again and improve organizational insight by automating your CAFR process with IBM Cognos Disclosure Management.  We’ve written about how this revolutionary, easy-to-use tool helps you save resources, reduce risk, cut costs, and even reduce cycle times. But it can also help you regain focus on all the details, both small and large, granting visibility into your CAFR process and enabling you to step back and look at your entire report as a whole.

Most challenges to organizational insight stemming from manual CAFR production processes are due to:

• Limited time
• Errors in the data that create a lack of confidence in the report
• Inability to incorporate last-minute changes into the report

All of these challenges are time-related, and if you’ve already read our explanation of how IBM Cognos Disclosure Management reduces your cycle times, then you might already know where we’re headed here. But if yours is like most organizations, you barely have enough time to finish your CAFR report to minimal satisfaction, let alone conduct the process with an optimal amount of communication, transparency, and visibility. So you’re often left with an opaque, difficult-to-manage process that provides results with dubious accuracy. But that’s not how things have to be.

Switch from your manual CAFR process to one automated by IBM Cognos Disclosure Management and you’ll improve organizational insight because:

• Collaboration, drag-and-drop workflow, report status, data integration, reusable templates, compliance checklists, a system-maintained audit trail, and lots of other features simplify and shorten the entire reporting process. That leaves you with more time and resources leftover to conduct detailed, accurate analysis of your situation.
• So many automated features, from variables in text to the system-maintained audit trail, virtually eliminate all the errors that riddle manual CAFR processes. This means that your data and the results of your analysis can be trusted.
• Real-time data enables you to automatically incorporate last-minute changes into your report. This adds even more credibility to your final CAFR because you won’t have missed a thing.

If you want to improve your organizational insight, regain visibility, and automate your CAFR process with IBM Cognos Disclosure Management, start now by contacting us (link). You can also click the button below and schedule a consultation today.