Johannesburg, 31 Oct 2013
Corporate finance teams often experience a time crunch when creating month-end and ad-hoc financial reports using standard Oracle E-Business Suite tools. With ever-tighter month-end closes, financial analysts and accountants need a way to expedite report creation, as well as gain access to reliable data.
Excel-based reporting software like GL Wand from Excel4apps provides access to live data in a dynamic, drillable format to answer these requirements. Here, Tiffany Newkirk, a former financial analyst and current solution specialist at Excel4apps, shares answers to common financial reporting questions from Oracle EBS users.
What is the value of real-time data at month's end?
As an accountant or financial analyst, you need the ability to quickly see accurate data, trial balances and last-minute journal entries in the General Ledger (GL) without having to recreate reports. With GL Wand's user-friendly Excel interface to live data, analysts simply click to refresh reports that reflect new journal entries in the balances as soon as they post to the ERP system. With other reporting tools, users wait for updates because the tool does not access real-time data, which delays the report-creation process.
How can you make ad-hoc reporting faster and easier for end-users?
Given their Excel expertise, financial analysts find creating reports within an Excel-based system a productive experience. With GL Wand, users build specialised reports very quickly using Excel formulas, IF statements, pivot tables and V lookup. Wizards and step-by-step instructions further expedite the process, and users can be confident in the real-time data. Analysts can easily drill into the report when the requesting manager is eagerly waiting on specific transactional information.
How do you complete accounts payable/accounts receivable reconciliations faster and more accurately?
AP and AR reconciliations are efficiently executed using GL Wand's drill-down capability, which supports a deeper look into accounts than even Oracle reports provide. Users can pull one or more accounts, as well as account listings, so that AP and AR information is available in one drill down, where they can easily pivot off the information. Journal source and category sections in the criteria page allow drills into sales invoices for a set timeframe. For example, the AR manager can modify the report for the time period and gain access to that month's sales invoices.
How do you effectively distribute reports with a real-time Excel-based system?
The Report Manager distribution tool in GL Wand allows users to create templates that execute financial reports and output them to a shared directory or e-mail them to specified contacts. Monthly departmental reports can be refreshed and e-mailed to managers with a mouse click. Because they are in a static format - Excel, HTML or PDF - managers don't need GL Wand to view them.
Why would an Oracle user want GL Wand instead of the new Client ADI?
One major reporting benefit of GL Wand is that it lets users consolidate the monthly financial package into one Excel workbook made up of multiple tabs. The first tab is a control page where users change the timeframe, hit the Refresh All button, and receive the entire updated monthly financial package - which is drillable to live data. With Client ADI, users must individually open each report in the package, then generate, refresh and execute it.
Excel4apps is a best-in-class provider of Excel-based reporting and budget-loading software for Oracle. The company serves more than 14 000 users from offices around the world.