Quick Insight Blog
Budgeting
Two areas of process improvement that may not be so obvious are reporting and the annual budgeting process.
Your financial staff spend countess hours staff assembling monthly board reports and graphs, and the annual budgeting process can be a daunting task when your staff are faced with using Excel. If you were to ask your CFO or Controller how many hours each month they spend putting reports together using Excel, you likely would find that this number approaching triple digits.
Fortunately, there now are software applications that dramatically improve the efficiency of this process, reducing it to days not weeks. The time saved can be used by your finance team to focus on the higher value analytic processes. Larry Bossidy, former CEO of AlliedSignal and author of Execution, the Discipline of Getting Things Done, shows in his book how to develop a budget in three days that is linked tightly to strategy, action plans and milestones. You can find a short review of Bossidy's book at our Articles tab.
These collaborative budget tools automatically send out budget templates to your business units for completion. The software then consolidates the data, saving hours of time and ensuring accuracy. In addition to the time savings for your financial staff, this collaborative process brings the business unit managers into the planning process and makes them accountable for their budget numbers.
If you are worried about the information risk in your organization of having hundreds of undocumented and uncontrolled excel spreadsheets generating your financial numbers, its time to explore these applications.
Process Reporting
Virtually every financial institutions is an expert at financial reporting, as they must be. Financial reports, however, are historical records, reflecting what transpired during the last reporting period with very little prescriptive power.
Process reporting, on the other hand, represents a new, cost-effective dimension to a bank's management capability by providing real-time insights into the internal processes that drive the next quarter's financial performance. A few examples of this type of reporting are: the number and types of transactions in the loan pipeline, the number and types of clients in the deposit pipeline, and number and types of clients in the remote deposit capture pipeline. At a more granular level, but even more useful, process reporting can show such data as the number of prospecting calls made by business development officers or the number of cross-sell calls made, key indicators of future financial performance.
Almost all of the new breed of workflow applications have reporting tools that can make this type of information easily available to management and staff. Depending on the need and the application itself, important information, such as loan pipeline reports, can be "pushed" to recipients through email.
Even if you are not ready to implement a workflow software solution, cost-effective reporting tools are available. The marketing program dashboard example above pulls and displays information from Microsoft Excel. The more visible the information, the more power it has to drive performance within the organization.
Getting Started
To talk with us about budgeting and reporting needs at your bank, simply email us or call 877.874.4457.