Do you remember all those reasons why you opted out of using Financial Reports and instead used Excel with Smart View for all of your EPM reporting needs? Was it because you had limited choices with colors? Couldn’t do butterfly reports?
Or, you couldn’t add notes against rows of data for variance explanations? Or could it be you just prefer sending out report books where all of the reports were contained within a single Excel workbook, with a table of contents, and on separate tabs?
If you are using EPM Cloud and still using Excel to support all of your reporting needs, you are seriously missing out on a HUGE opportunity to streamline your R2R (Record to Report) cycles.
Have you checked out what’s happening with EPM Cloud Reports and Narrative Reporting lately? If you have, you will know that all of the items I mentioned in the beginning are no longer limitations and now out-of-the-box capabilities.
These products have gone through massive feature updates in just the last 2 years for providing a framework with the flexibility to achieve the desired aesthetics, improving creation, maintenance, and administration of report packages, and achieving feature parity with the legacy Financial Reports product.
Let me take this hour to catch you up with these game-changing new features in Reports and Narrative Reporting that dropped over the past 2 years, and led companies to invest in transforming their R2R processes to replace their manual Excel reports and report packages, and thus improve reporting cycle times. |
