Calling all local government finance departments! Let’s talk about your financial statements, which can be your Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR), Popular Annual Financial Report (PAFR), budget book, or even a small monthly report. Does your team still use manual processes to create these financial statement reports with Word and Excel? Maybe you’d like to change but you aren’t sure it would bring enough benefits to move to a new system compared to the hassle and disruption it might create for you and your team.
There are several different solutions, but in this post we’ll explain what you can expect from the Workiva software, which is built to automate financial reporting and simplify workflows.
Workiva Reporting Benefits
Automating Financials Statements
Local governments need print ready financial statements for a variety of reasons – compliance, budgeting, audit prep, stakeholder communication, etc. Every year, you revise your reports with new numbers, change the narrative content, change the dates throughout the files, and many other small details. When people use manual processes, these combined tasks require many hours of work at a high risk of mistakes as the financials pass from person to person. With automated financial statements, that same journey is accomplished with reduced time and fewer errors.
Linking
One of the best time-saving aspects of the software is “linking.” By setting up the linking function, you can move financial data from the Workiva spreadsheet (an Excel equivalent) to a Workiva document (a Word equivalent), allowing for seamless, continuous live updating between the two. So now, when numbers and dates change—be it at the beginning of a new year, or when you need to make a correction at the end of a year—those figures flow from the spreadsheets to the document. The document’s graphs, charts, and text descriptions are linked back to a central database holding the data points. Another benefit of linking is that you no longer need to place pictures of your tables and charts in your Word documents. Your charts are automatically replaced whenever the data change. Figures and dates in the text are also linked and will renew—like magic.
Final Formatting
Those final formatting steps for the all-important quarterly or year-end reports can drive people up the wall. For the biggest reports, it’s often the little things—like page numbers, table of contents, inserts, and headers—that can ruin a well-designed annual report. Here’s the thing: if these cosmetic aspects of the report are incorrect, the whole project looks unprofessional and the numbers can be in doubt even if they’re perfect! Many people must send reports off to another department or even outsource the compilation and printing to get it all done on time. What if the print department is behind or the printer is down? Who needs that stress?
With automated financial reporting software, the pagination, table of contents, headers, footers, table of charts, sections, and more minutiae for the report can all be programmed to update automatically in the document. Because everything is linked, you always have a print-ready report available. If you do a lot of art overlays, you or your designers can work simultaneously using Workiva’s design-reporting feature that allows real-time, on-the-fly changes.
Data Handling
One of the most critical steps in transitioning to automation is tackling the data. Managing and keeping clean data throughout the year can be a huge burden, and corrupt data creates havoc with reports. Manual copying to Excel, running look-ups to get the numbers needed, and then typing those figures into the spreadsheet takes time and invites errors. This is where automation really shines.
Workiva can take an extract from your system that can be automatically pulled down, or it can use direct integration, if available, with your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Then, by applying rules (theirs or yours, perhaps), it can group your accounts by line items that can be tailored to handle any exceptions. After the accounts are grouped, the software applies a formula to pull the data to your spreadsheets. Through this means, your data will flow automatically to your spreadsheets every time there’s a change. You can spend time verifying and analyzing the data instead of simply trying to put the data into the sheets. In addition, this ingenious formula allows your team to create new columns and rows simply and easily each year by pulling in the data for future years.
With the automations listed above your report is already fully prepared with numbers and data linked together to form a print-ready report. This same report can be updated easily year after year, saving your team a lot of time.
So, let’s talk now about some of the other benefits and features you can gain to streamline your workflow across the tasks that repeat every year. For instance, collaboration is a piece of cake with Workiva.
Workiva Collaboration Benefits
Internal Collaboration
When your spreadsheet and document are in Workiva, your whole team can collaborate seamlessly and simultaneously in the common workspace. Any person can be in any spot and everybody can see everyone’s changes in real time. In addition, you can move your communication about your file into the platform by highlighting a single cell or piece of text about which you need clarity or a change of some sort, perhaps. If it’s urgent, you can tag and send a message to another team member right in the software, which will notify them via email to check the message and point them directly to your issue. By the way, those comments can be marked “in progress,” “waiting,” or “completed” so you can have immediate status updates.
External Collaboration
Collaboration doesn’t have to stop with your team though. Most times there are some parts your team doesn’t control, and you need another department or organization to provide you with data that you then manually enter. Workiva permits unlimited users, so you can grant people in other departments access to individual folders, files, and even sections to do their parts. They used to pass these tasks off to your team, but now, the team suddenly has free time. You could even give access to your auditors and allow them to make their comments and change requests right in the file where you could correct them—in real time.
More To Come
Workiva continues to add big and small improvements, one of which is a plan to have auto skip hide zero row functionality by the end of Q3 2024, for instance. Other improvements come from user suggestions, which Workiva welcomes through its custom scripting feature.
LSL and Workiva
The LSL team can bring your unique automation ideas to life in Workiva. Because Workiva allows for custom scripting, our team can help you implement the standard Workiva plus workflows or features it didn’t know its clients needed!
A great example of this is rounding checks:
Our team can set up rounding checks on your file to compare values and automatically plug minor variances to rows automatically. In addition, the software can give you a central document that allows you to see all your relations, showing which are balanced and which are not. We can even work with your team to handle exceptions.
Note: The examples provided are just a glimpse of what automating reports can bring to your team. And there’s much, much more! Contact LSL today.
