When you prepare your Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR), you probably rely on two primary pieces of software: Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word. You use Microsoft Excel to produce the numbers and spreadsheet portions of the CAFR, and you use Microsoft Word to produce the words and narrative portions. Both serve as dynamic tools and have many positive capabilities, but they also have some striking limitations.
On one hand, you have Word and Excel’s obvious good points. Most of today’s workforce is at least passingly familiar with using them, and your department is probably staffed with at least one Excel and Word whiz kid who knows how to use them to their fullest. Their documents are also easy to save and share with others, and they have powerful formatting features. All in all, they are incredibly robust tools.
On the other hand, you have to concede that for certain tasks, Word and Excel fall short. While you can easily share their documents, actually collaborating on them with your colleagues is difficult, and because they lack proper audit trails and version controls, they are prone to miscommunication. And as well as creating an awkward workflow in general, there are so many ways that this manual process can create mistakes. When you need to build complex, important documents like the CAFR, you really don’t have time for the problems these limitations can cause.
So you’re stuck using software that offers a lot of utility on the one hand, but still causes critical problems on the other.
We now believe it is possible to get the best of both worlds and drop the bad.
We propose to revolutionize your CAFR process with IBM Cognos Disclosure Management. This evolutionary software tool automates the entire reporting process from end to end, which helps to:
- Reduce risk
- Save resources
- Cut costs
- Decrease cycle times
- Improve organizational insight
Want to learn more? This is the first in a series of posts that explain how IBM Cognos Disclosure Management makes all the improvements listed above. Watch this space to learn more – or if you have questions for us now, just click the button below to contact us.
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