Month End's made easy, by Brian Doherty

Do you have to produce management accounts quickly and for various stakeholders in various formats? Are you transcribing data from your accounts package to other systems or into excel spreadsheets? How long are you spending doing this task? Are you concerned that that the links in your spreadsheets may not be 100%?

Software systems such as Sage 200 offer a number of options to alleviate the pressure at Month End time. Sage 200 for example, uses a report category, attached to the nominal code, to build the Financial Statements. The Sage 200 Financial statements begin as a blank canvas and through an intelligent use of the report category, various Profit and Loss and Balance Sheet layouts can be produced.
It’s so easy to do and saves lots of time messing about with spreadsheets. You can produce reports such as:

1. month actual versus budget with a variance column.
2. Year actual versus budget with a variance column.
3. month on month analysis and comparisons.
4. prior year month/year to date versus current year month/year to date.
5. quarterly results can also be reported.
6. or any combination of the above.


The flexibility of Sage 200 means that you can either build your multiple financial layouts within Sage 200 or you can use the Business Intelligence module, which comes as standard with the software. This is a great tool which allows you to drag and drop the data into the format you require – similar to using a Pivot Table in Excel ®.

Why add extra pressure at month end time? Your financial software system should be there to make your life easier – not to add to your workload. You may find that the tools are already there, but maybe you haven’t asked “is there a better way?". It is worth looking into as it could save you a lot of valuable time.