Financial Statements: The Challenges and Best Practice

An increased level of time pressure requires mainly focus on collecting and validating financial data, leaving little time to analyse it. Not to mention the chance to formulate strategies for growth.  

Effective financial consolidation: Facts and checklist 

With the right solution, you can significantly reduce the time needed to prepare your financial statements. It can give you consistent and reliable figures, thus reducing the time required for financial consolidation, planning and reporting. The benefit is obvious: you finally have more time to analyse and draw up strategies. 

LucaNet, the software provider for financial consolidation, looks at some of the challenges posed by financial statements and gives a practical insight. 

Challenges in preparing financial statements 

Working with their clients, LucaNet saw a number of challenges faced whilst preparing consolidated financial statements. As a result, they identified what prevents companies from consolidating faster and have summarised the most significant challenges: 

Challenge 1: Time-consuming manual processes 

Especially when working with traditional systems such as Excel, manual data entry can take hours to complete: It is nearly impossible to ensure automated processes and the consolidation workflow over any number of levels of corporate structures at the touch of a button. 

Challenge 2: Inaccurate financial data 

Manually entering and maintaining financial data guarantees errors will be made, with a wide range of effects from unintentionally deleting items to outdated and inaccurate data as well as incorrect links and formulas. 

Challenge 3: Format changes due to a patchwork of systems 

When working with stand-alone solutions, changes in format can occur, often resulting in inconsistent data and coordination issues. 

Challenge 4: Unsatisfactory collaboration 

A lack of system support can quickly lead to misunderstandings about deadlines, responsibilities and data delivery. Countless rounds of clarification can prolong the consolidation process. 

And if individual and consolidated financial statements are not interlinked, the process often becomes even more prone to errors, more complex, and inefficient. 

The right solution for efficiently preparing financial statements 

Many companies know that they won’t get very far with Excel spreadsheets for complex financial statements and should rely on consolidation solution instead. However, many financial teams find it difficult to implement a professional software solution for their company’s financial statements, because: 

• The specialist departments use different systems that are not compatible with each other. 
• The software used is outdated. 

The result? Only at the very last minute, when the system begins to jeopardize their company’s proper business activities, does the team take action. 

The road to optimised financial consolidation 

Companies that tackle their individual problems at an early stage when preparing financial statements will soon be on the fast track to success.  

To learn more how to improve the reporting process and get access to the best practice, download ‘’The fast track to reliable consolidated financial statements’ e-book.

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