Financial reporting is a heavy and, more often than not, intimidating aspect of working in or managing a financial function. The reporting process involves gathering a large quantity of data around your organisation’s revenue, transactions, and performance and consolidating them into three core financial statements. These statements, namely the income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement, allow an organisation and its stakeholders to review financial performance and profitability.
This reporting process is not just important for identifying key trends and driving informed decisions on future strategy, it’s also a regulatory requirement. With so much pressure on this process and finance teams, having a robust and accurate reporting function is essential – putting the same scrutiny on the financial reporting software you use.
To ensure your reporting is watertight, we’ll be looking at the best reporting tools for your finance teams.
What is Financial Reporting Software?
Financial reporting software are tools designed to support finance teams in the creation of their reports. The definition is quite broad, as it can both include software that automates processes, consolidates data, or creates the reports themselves. Reporting software often performs multiple functions, such as budgeting, forecasting, modelling, and financial planning and analysis, in order to improve the speed and accuracy with which financial reports can be created.
What Features Should Financial Reporting Tools Include?
While each piece of reporting software differs in its offering, if it is aiding in the reporting process it should include the following features as standard:
Integrations with existing tech stacks. Reporting software should fit naturally into your processes and existing technology. It should have the functionality to integrate with different pieces of financial software, for example with your CPM or budgeting software, to speed up movement between them.
Data consolidation. By far the most time-consuming task for most finance teams is consolidating or collecting data from different systems, outputs, teams and parts of the business. Any effective piece of reporting software should include data consolidation functionality.
Templates and formulas. Your financial reporting software should be able to perform financial formulas on the data that is collected. As a key part of the financial statements, performing these formulas on your data speeds up the reporting process. Similarly, providing templates for the statements themselves is a key element of automation your reporting software should provide.
These are the most standard features you should expect to find in reporting software.
How to Choose the Best Reporting Software for Your Business
Choosing the right reporting software for your organisation should focus around finding software that is suitable for your pre-existing operations. If you have to change your processes to incorporate a reporting tool, you are spending more time and money than is necessary – ideally, it should start taking the pressure off your teams immediately.
There are multiple areas of suitability to consider. First is your existing technology. Your financial reporting software should be able to effectively communicate and combine with your existing software tools, whether that’s pre-existing finance software or the spreadsheet software you use. Next is its suitability with the size of your business – investigate whether the software can provide insights that are well-suited for your business size and can handle the quantity of data you will need to process (especially relevant for enterprise size businesses). You should finally consider whether it can meet the regulatory requirements you have for your reporting.
How Can Good Financial Reporting Software Improve Your Processes?
When you pick the right piece of reporting software, your finance team and operations will benefit in the following ways:
You’ll save time and money on your reporting process with a more efficient operation.
Your data accumulation will be smoother and more complete without the need to rely on manual aggregation.
There will be better collaboration between different teams in your business.
By using software to consolidate and check data, your reports will contain fewer errors and be more accurate.
The 11 Best Financial Reporting Tools
We’ve assessed the current market to collect the 11 best pieces of software for financial reporting, using ratings from G2 as well as analysis from experts in our own finance team.
1. Abacum
Why it stands out: Abacum’s software is built to automate and simplify reporting processes with a platform that collects and visualises data in real time. Their real-time reporting function keeps your reports constantly updated for when they are needed, meaning your stakeholders can get the information they need quicker. Additionally, effective integration features that effortlessly combine data from a huge suite of other software pieces, The Abacum platform is built from the ground up to enable your reporting process to be simplified and automated, enabling better efficiency in your business as a whole.
Key features: Abacum’s integration technology is especially effective at communicating with other systems. Their selection of premade templates, which have the flexibility to be edited and amended to suit your specific reporting needs, also helps creating detailed reports quickly – simply move the real-time reporting Abacum performs into templates to create reports. Collaborative working is also enabled through the Abacum platform, with the ability for multiple people to view and work on reports simultaneously.
What to look out for: This financial planning and analysis software is especially effective at automating reporting processes for midmarket businesses thanks to their collaboration function which best supports team sizes at midmarket organisations. Abacum also stands out for their customer service and fast product development – with any issues quickly resolved by their team and requested features quickly built into the software.
G2 rating: 4.8/5
2. Oracle NetSuite
Why it stands out: Oracle NetSuite is a cloud ERP solution with a number of different functions. Amongst its large selection of financial applications is reporting. It’s a well-known platform that is used internationally and, as such, many different platforms and third-party software platforms have been developed to integrate with Oracle features.
Key features: NetSuite’s reporting capabilities are flexible and they include real-time analytics than enable the quick creation of different report statements. As Oracle has a number of different functions, it can be integrated as an all-in-one solution for your finance teams. Integrations with lots of different software platforms means it can usually be brought in to be plug-and-play with a large number of integrations available.
What to look out for: While NetSuite is widely used that does not make it easy to use or learn – in fact, the platform requires a lot of learning with a difficult learning curve. It’s notoriety also means the software carries a high price tag, despite not offering better service than competitor software.
G2 rating: 4.0/5
3. Vena Solutions
Why it stands out: For those organisations who work closely with Excel in their processes, Vena’s software provides an effective solution for reporting. Vena is built to work natively with Excel and integrates well with other Microsoft programs such as Power BI.
Key features: When working at its best, Vena’s software has an easy-to-use interface and dashboards, custom reporting features that you can tailor for your organisation, and useful financial forecasting features that are supported by AI tools which offer insights into your financial performance.
What to look out for: Vena is built for Excel – but it suffers when it needs to work alongside other some reporting software and functionalities. In some cases, you may need to use an additional Vena API to enable it to integrate with other technologies. It’s Mac and Mobile dashboards are also unoptimised.
G2 rating: 4.6/5
4. Drivetrain
Why it stands out: The Drivetrain platform is designed to enable collaboration within financial teams when creating reports. Simple dashboards allow users to quickly see and understand financial performance, while effective integration technology allows for data consolidation from ERPs to CRMs and billing platforms.
Key features: Drivetrain’s FP&A solution excels at allowing teams to collaborate in report creation by consolidating data. Their reporting functionality also includes pre-built templates for automation of the report process.
What to look out for: Drivetrain’s software is effective at many things, but a specialist in none. While it is good for midmarket organisations, the collaborative aspects are occasionally undermined by difficulties with user access.
G2 rating: 4.8/5
5. MosaicTech
Why it stands out: A cross-departmental reporting platform, Mosaic again stands out for its ability to enable collaborative reporting across an organisation. Its user-friendly platform can be easily installed and learned by new users.
Key features: Mosaic offers modelling and metric building capabilities that can help with the wider reporting process and enable the creation of reports that are specialised to specific organisations. There’s also effective data aggregation and integration with other platforms that enables the cross-departmental aspect.
What to look out for: The Mosaic platform is built for controllers and users on the executive level. This makes it good in small companies and start-ups, but is not suitable at all for anything larger where dedicated finance teams are responsible for report creation.
G2 rating: 4.7/5
6. Anaplan
Why it stands out: A web-based software platform that operates in the cloud, Anaplan is built for enterprise-size businesses with a focus on allowing visibility and collaboration across a large number of users. Complex modelling and monitoring allow efficient monitoring of performance even in large businesses.
Key features: As an enterprise-level tool, Anaplan’s software is effective at processing large quantities of data in the cloud. There’s also the functionality to create customised dashboards.
What to look out for: Integrations with other platforms is difficult to manage due to the fact it is web-based. Not a great fit for non-enterprise sized organisations.
G2 rating:4.6/5
7. Datarails
Why it stands out: Datarails is an FP&A platform that focuses on data collection and automation, with effective financial reporting capabilities build into the product. Their organisation is also well-known for its good customer service.
Key features: The software takes a strong focus on collecting, consolidating, and aggregating data and as a result it has excellent integration capabilities with data warehouse platforms and with native Excel data.
What to look out for: As a platform that focuses primarily on data automation, the reporting capabilities it boasts are fairly primary. While it is effective when handled by seasoned users, dashboards and set-up is not user friendly – especially on Mac, where there are consistent performance issues.
G2 rating:4.7/5
8. Workday Adaptive Planning
Why it stands out: Workday adaptive planning is, as the name does suggest, built around its powerful analytics, modeling and forecasting tools that allow for effective reporting for stakeholders. The platform also allows for effective automation for finance teams through a number of different tools.
Key features: Automation is enabled through its selection of pre-built templates, including the three different financial statements. There is also easy set up for integrations with other pieces of Workday software.
What to look out for: Unfortunately, it lacks the capabilities for extensive data consolidation and collection outside the Workday suite – limiting the automation it can perform if tech stacks don’t align. There’s also limited dashboards and the templates themselves are limited in their customisation.
G2 rating:4.3/5
9. Planful
Why it stands out: Planful is primarily a cloud-based corporate management and FP&A platform with reporting facilities built in. The planful platform is easy to use and navigate, with the ability to create customised dashboards.
Key features: Effective consolidation and collection of data which can be translated into a number of different report types for tailored reporting to stakeholders. There’s also effective security and in-built permissions controls for different user types.
What to look out for: The reporting facilities of the software are not overly developed and, as a result, simple functionalities such as custom formulas and dashboards cannot be created. It also lacks effective user collaboration.
G2 rating:4.3/5
10. Cube
Why it stands out: Cube’s software is a centralised platform for financial planning and analysis with spreadsheets as the intended output – as a result it integrates effectively with both Google sheets and excel. It is generally designed to provide automation to finance teams.
Key features: It has an interface which is easy to use and can be very easily installed for new users and systems. Custom models and platform integrations allow for lots of automation within finance teams.
What to look out for: Cube lacks functionality for predictive forecasting, which can be an issue when creating certain reports for stakeholders. It is also difficult to collaborate with other users on the platform.
G2 rating:4.5/5
Key Takeaways
Choosing your financial reporting software is not an easy task, but when doing so focus on the objectives that matter to your business.
Consider specifically what you want to achieve through adding software into your reporting process; that might be better collaboration, it might be better automation, or perhaps better consolidation for your data. Then compare these against the software we’ve reviewed above – here’s a reminder of the top 3:
Abacum
Oracle NetSuite
Vena Solutions
