CFOs and other finance managers don’t need to play detective any more to pull together a picture of how their organisation is performing.

Phocas Software offers data analytics, financial reporting, budgeting and forecasting in one tool. It presents ERP (enterprise resource planning) and other operations systems data in a user-friendly way that enables managers and decision-makers to get to key facts first – freeing up finance teams and accountants to focus less on crunching numbers and more on being trusted advisers.

Providing a single source of truth

Traditional financial reporting involves creating standardised statements and reports that are shared with various managers and decision-makers. When these individuals have questions about the numbers, they return to the finance team which needs to investigate further and generate more static reports.

Phocas Software’s intuitive financial software enables finance teams to:

• customise and add calculations such as EBIT, margins and ratios
• create administrative control with filtered and restricted access
• build dashboards of financial performance
• drill through to transactions for quick data queries without touching the ledger.

“Finance spends less time creating reports,” explains Jordena Tibble CA, a chartered accountant with more than 15 years’ experience who is at the forefront of product development at Phocas.

“You can sit back, look at the numbers, look for trends and provide your own views, insights and analysis.”

Using Phocas, business leader buy-in to the budgets improves, says Tibble, “and becomes less complicated when the forecasting process is completed collaboratively with good tools and systems in place.

“The dynamic solution makes building KPIs and annual budgets as well as forecasting and re-forecasting enjoyable, so people come back to it and use it as a guide instead of dreading the next cycle.”

Cloud collaboration

With permissions and controls in place, Phocas Software’s product is accessible on the cloud. Anybody from the company with access can review mission-critical data from anywhere – something that has become more important with teams working from home.

Tibble says this means key data is no longer stuck in spreadsheets and the finance team can share up-to-date numbers and coach others in the business about financial performance.

The outcomes of a cloud-based planning, reporting and analytics solution is that monthly reporting speeds up, reports can be easily customised, budgeting and forecasting takes on a refreshed approach that is accessible to all, and day-to-day analytics to track business performance is made possible for finance and its partners.

Getting clients to a position where they can remove information clutter in order to report elegantly is a part of the job Tibble most enjoys.

“I just love talking to customers, and they’ll say, ‘This is how we used to report’,” Tibble says.

“They’ll show me the spreadsheet, scroll left and right, up and down, and move the tabs to, ‘This is how we’re now reporting using Phocas’. It is a lot cleaner and simple.”

JOIN OUR WEBINAR

Join the Phocas webinar “Collaborative financial planning and analysis (FP&A)” on 3 May 2022 to learn more. Register at phocassoftware.com/ca or email [email protected]