Help clients navigate unsettling economic times with these five types of essential digital reporting
Help clients navigate unsettling economic times with these five types of essential digital reporting
The current economic climate is an unsettling period, according to KPMG’s recent Global Economic Outlook, which describes the past twelve months as turbulent and uncertain with a constant wave of challenges and threats.
The Outlook report uses the phrase ‘without respite’ – and many factors will cause concern amongst your clients: armed conflict with far-reaching consequences, supply chain issues and shortages, and rising inflation. At the same time, there is a tight labour market and talk of a looming recession in the UK.
But now is not the time for doom-scrolling. While KPMG’s latest Outlook might present a gloomy global picture, it shines a bright light on the path ahead. Similarly, your clients will look to you to reassure and advise them on an increasingly complex journey.
So how can you reassure and advise - and help to increase your clients’ financial resilience, achieve sustainable growth, and ease how companies adapt to the new economy? Having a readily available suite of digital reporting could be your answer.
Digital reporting tools
Modern accountancy platforms can generate dynamic, robust real-time reporting to help you and your clients navigate the most difficult times. Particularly true if you have clients working in multi-entity groups across global regions and navigating multiple business threats and challenges.
A legacy of Covid, undoubtedly one of the biggest challenges we’ve all experienced recently, is that shifting an organisation to a digital-first mindset is a top priority for 77% of business leaders, according to the Advanced Annual Trends Survey 2021.
Adopting digital tools is now a given. And because new tools see data as a dynamic asset – and not statically confined to spreadsheet fields – digital reporting is one of the most powerful assets you can have.
At Joiin, we work closely accountants and advisors who have clients requiring powerful reporting, such as business owners, entrepreneurs, investors, and collaborators alike who need to consolidate and report on finances across several companies. These might be across business portfolios, family offices or global operations in multiple countries.
Here, we explore five types of digital reporting that are already driving critical insights into the health of businesses, identifying risks and opportunities, and helping to build robust financial narratives.
1. At-a-glance dashboards
Dynamic data is no more apparent than in a real-time dashboard.
Even if the economy shifts rapidly daily, an on-screen dashboard lets you quickly grasp that day’s highlights and instantly make sense of your numbers. If your client has a consolidated portfolio, you will get a clearer real-time picture of performance across all business entities.
How our Joiin platform can help: Joiin’s dashboard delivers a highly visual one-page financial overview presented visually in charts and graphs that are easy on the eye. It looks great on mobile and desktop, meaning you can easily stay up to date with the metrics that matter most to you, wherever you are. A Joiin dashboard can be created for one entity (if you just want to monitor a specific company) up to multiple entities for more complex group reporting.
2. Off-the-shelf reports
In these unsettling times, your clients are likely looking for astute advice. In turn, the downward pressure on you to be more efficient with your time and to better utilise this for advisory services is only increasing.
Time-saving initiatives may well be a top agenda item for you right now. If so, many digital accountancy platforms now offer pre-built reporting templates that you can easily use with existing data, taking the strain out of monthly consolidated group reporting while clawing back vital time for use elsewhere in your work.
How our Joiin platform can help: Simple to integrate with existing cloud accountancy software, our Joiin platform offers five core off-the-shelf reports. Our off-the-shelf reports are profit & loss, balance sheet, cash flow, KPIs, and trial balance. These reports mean you can efficiently run reports as the Joiin platform’s readymade automation does all the heavy lifting for you.
Joiin case study: For Joiin customer Great Dental Websites, ready-made reporting means reports can be pulled within seconds and generated automatically (where previously this took days). Every quarter, the company runs around 250+ reports from within Joiin, delivering more substantial financial insights for multiple stakeholders and enabling teams spread across two continents and four countries to share one accurate picture of accounts.
3. Customisable reports
While off-the-shelf reports are ideal for common reporting scenarios, there will be times when you need a tailor-made report, such as a bespoke client presentation or to meet a specific regional accounting requirement.
Many modern platforms will offer a wealth of rich filters and features to help you edit reports and build a financial narrative around any specific economic factors you want to address.
How our Joiin platform can help: Our Joiin platform comes with a complete set of filters and features, meaning you can easily customise reports to meet your clients’ needs. You can control things like branding and exchange rates. At the same time, automatic conversions simplify reporting across different currencies, and straightforward filtering eliminates the information you don’t need in a consolidated group report.
Joiin case study: UK-based chartered accountants Bulley Davey use Joiin largely to consolidate profit and loss reports and balance sheets, enabling their advisors to build an accurate picture for each client. The Bulley Davey team customise Joiin reports so they can drill down to details to assist groups, such as the movement of funds between companies.
4. Report packs
Within Joiin, you can go one step further and use your tailored customisations to create highly professional report packs.
Report packs enable you to create more time for yourself by making it easy to deliver regular in-depth reporting, such as monthly client reports. With just a few clicks in Joiin, you can see everything in one document and export it as a PDF or spreadsheet for easy distribution and keep any created packs for future re-use.
How our Joiin platform can help: You can group all a client’s reports into one package that can be quickly sent and then downloaded by them as a PDF or Excel spreadsheet. In practice, this means selecting any combination of custom reports, personalising them with relevant branding, and efficiently running off a pack whenever you need to, whether for a client meeting or presentation.
5. Automated reporting
Automation has been a growing trend in accounting, with routine administrative and rules-based tasks often automated. A Deloitte/IMA survey indicated that more than 50% of finance and accounting professionals felt automation would impact how their company performed its work in the coming years.
With reporting such a critical piece of the accountant/client relationship, automated reporting now provides a rock-solid way to distribute reports effectively to your clients. The result: you can build new relationships and cement existing ones based on the regular and accurate reporting required by your clients.
How our Joiin platform can help: Within Joiin, our multi-client feature has been designed specifically for chartered accountants, letting you can create separate areas for managing clients and automating how reports are shared. You get to provide your clients with an individual portal where only their bespoke reports are available, with each client able to view wherever they are.
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About Joiin
Joiin are an official ICAS Evolve partner, who can help you to manage your multi-entity and multi-currency group consolidations, creating great looking financial reports and management reporting packs from your Xero, Quickbooks, Sage, and Excel Data.
ICAS member firms can try Joiin for free by clicking here
This blog is one of a series of articles from our commercial partners. The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of ICAS.