Do you trust your reporting process?

The creation process of financial reports and budgets is critical in terms of content, consistency and compliancy.

In many environments this process is executed in an unstructured way and with a lot of time pressure. Reports are created manually, with many users involved, using email as the primary workflow system, and copy, cut and paste are normal. This opens the door to inconsistencies and errors. The lack of a supportive database frustates the re-use of existing report elements.

Executives and report owners, responsible for the final reports have no insight what so ever in the process itself. Error free reporting is an illusion. Responsible executives are forced to sign off on reports without having real insight how the report was created. Who exactly contributed what, where and how?

Reviews are done by a group of "reliable" employees that have done this many times before……………….

Multiple versions, many iterations and a publishing process that is cumbersome, always with many last minute changes and a lack of control.

Is this still sufficient nowadays? Do you really dare to state that you trust your reporting process?