Reporting strategies for FP&A

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I have a love/hate relationship with reporting.

On one hand, it’s the most tangible way to add value to executives within an organization.

On the other, it can cause a massive drain on capacity if you aren’t careful.

And if you ask your business partners what they want from your reporting, their requests will be endless - on-demand, interactive, real-time, daily 🫤

That’s why good FP&A teams build what is asked leveraging innovative tools

While I’m a huge advocate of innovative reporting tools, that doesn’t solve the long-term problem of endless reporting.

Before long you’ll find yourself maintaining hundreds of “automated” reports that are breaking because the business is migrating systems, KPIs are changing, etc.

And simply building what is asked by the business leaders will leave you with a confusing mess of reports that don’t reconcile.

So we need a bigger vision for reporting.

That vision: Drive result clarity without wasting time

Let’s talk about how:

Map your reporting ecosystem

Do you know how many reports your FP&A team produces?
Do you know how much time it takes?
Is that the right amount of reports, delivered at the right time, in the right way?

These core questions are a great start for mapping your reporting ecosystem.

The first 2 get you to inventory your reporting while the last one gets you to think about your ideal vision for reporting.

Both are essential to moving into the proactive reporting strategy that fits in our vision.

Every report should be evaluated on a number of criteria (which are covered in-depth in Next Level FP&A). My favorite of those criteria is the 4-square grid shown below:

The goal of the framework above is to plot every report you produce on the 2×2 grid of:

• Standardized v Customized (how often the report changes)

• Automated v High-touch (how much energy it takes to produce)

And while I looooovvvveeee automated + standardized, there is plenty of room for the need to have customized + high-touch reporting. I’d even argue that every FP&A team should have a mix of both of these types of reports.

But what you’ll notice is that I’m not a fan of the following combinations:

• Customized + Automated (automation thrives with little/no changes)

• Standardized + High-touch (if something is standardized, you should be automating it)

Which means every report you produce that isn’t on the diagonal line in the 2×2 framework, needs to be evaluated.

The 3 golden layers of reporting

The single most common issue I see with new reporting requests is: scope creep.

Here’s an example:

• Ops manager asks for new report to track their team’s KPIs

• COO hears about report and also wants use that report to understand Ops KPIs

• Since senior leaders are using that report, front line Ops employees want that report to help them understand what’s driving the trend for KPIs

And before you know it, you have a massive report that serves 3 different audiences (Executive, Manager, Analyst).

I’m a strong advocate of separating these 3 layers into their own separate reports.

Each layer of reporting has different needs:

• Executives need monthly (maybe weekly) reporting pushed to them that aligns with company targets with just enough info for them to understand the storyline

• Managers need weekly (maybe daily) reporting that allows them to hold their teams accountable for executing the process

• Analysts (I use this term to mean front line business folks) need ad hoc reports that allow them to uncover opportunities and drive action on a per-unit basis every day

Which means developing a single report to do all of this will ensure you create the world’s largest report that is confusing for people to access and use (not cool) or you build a report that doesn’t quite hit the mark for anybody.

And although they asked for a report, is that really what they need???

Do you even need a report?

Early in my career I learned one of my favorite FP&A tricks.

The head of Sales would walk over and ask for a report of some kind.

I’d give 2 options:

1. Building a report will take me 1 week and I’ll have to remove something else to make capacity (boooooo)

2. I could deliver a quick analysis tomorrow, then we can decide if it needs to be a recurring analysis and maybe a report (yayyyyy)

I’m sure you already know which one wins 90% of the time…

Instead of building myself a bunch of recurring reports that are underutilized, I arguably added a ton more value to the business by more quickly producing detailed analysis.

And sometimes those requests turned into reports. But often, they were never thought of again.

Remember, it’s easy for non-finance professionals to ask for a report.

But often a simple analysis delivered via email will do the trick.

Key takeaways

Becoming a next level reporting talent requires more than simply leveraging better tools to build what’s asked.

Instead, focus on what your ideal reporting end state looks like and start migrating your existing reporting to fit.

And fight the urge to add more reports and turn your existing reports into frankenstein reports.

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