Why Choose Narrative Reporting?
Does your organization struggle to get an accurate view of your business beyond financial statements? Do your annual reports accurately reflect your market position, performance, and future prospects?
EPM Product Management leader and Senior Director at Oracle, Al Marciante, reveals that "Ninety percent of companies agree that expanding qualitative commentary is critical, yet most spend all their time gathering data and have no time to create a narrative or do extensive analysis. Without this narrative reporting accompanying the data, significant facts can be ignored or obscured."
What is Narrative Reporting?
Gathering, reviewing, and reporting on critical organizational data is a time-consuming task that often makes the reporting process inefficient and outdated. The good news is that Oracle Cloud EPM Narrative Reporting can help organizations overcome these reporting hurdles. Narrative Reporting is a purpose-built business process in Oracle Cloud EPM for management, narrative, and regulatory reporting.
In an article describing Narrative Reporting in Oracle Cloud EPM, Oracle reveals that Narrative Reporting provides a "secure, collaborative, process-driven approach for defining, authoring, reviewing, and publishing financial and management report packages for internal and external stakeholders." For example, reports can be created using multiple sources such as Oracle application modules like Planning and Financial Close and Consolidation.
Corporate Reporting Challenges
Accurate reports are critical for maintaining relationships with shareholders and ensuring that the weekly, monthly, or quarterly reports accurately portray how the organization is performing in order to make strategic business decisions.
It is vital to overcome the many challenges associated with corporate reporting. For example, many reporting processes are manual, time-consuming, and improvised. As a result, monthly, quarterly, and year-end shareholder reporting becomes a considerable task for the finance team. Furthermore, tight reporting timelines often have an adverse effect on reporting as organizations run out of time to properly analyze the data and validate the narrative before the report package must be submitted.
Streamlined Reports
Generating meaningful reports can be a challenge for any organization. The goal is to avoid a situation where stakeholders share conflicting reports that end up causing confusion and waste employees’ time trying to determine the data's accuracy.
Oracle's EPM Cloud Narrative Reporting makes it possible to eliminate faulty manual data entry and instead develop a "single source of truth" for the organization. It also combines data and narrative in a streamlined process and connects multiple data sources into one report.
Secure data
Having automated and consolidated reports that are easily accessible to the entire organization does not have to lead to compromised security. Oracle's Narrative Reporting allows multiple authors to be defined with varying levels of access and permissions. This ensures that access to the reports is controlled so they can be secured. Additionally, limiting viewing and editing capabilities to specific individuals makes the report's accuracy more certain.
Unified planning and reporting
Oracle's article, Narrative Reporting in Oracle Cloud EPM, discloses that "Narrative Reporting enables business users to participate in the narrative reporting process through the web interface on a variety of devices, including desktops and tablets." Narrative reporting supports the various reporting cycles needed to keep the review process on track by facilitating collaboration, review, and approvals between all the users.
Users can authorize the involvement of multiple subject matter experts within the organization to work on reports while maintaining the integrity of confidential information by giving users the appropriate level of access. Various roles, like Owner, Author, Approver, Reviewer, and Viewer, can be assigned to users while providing a secure and auditable single point for updates that satisfies internal, external, and regulatory reporting requirements. Users can continuously track the report creation process, monitor the overall report’s progress, and confidently report externally to banks and internally to management and the board.
Narrative Reporting Use Cases
Some of the reporting templates embedded into the Narrative Report package include:
- Internal monthly, quarterly, and year-end business performance review documents
- Board Books
- Business briefing documents
- Business unit or divisional performance review documents
- External quarterly and annual reports.
- Stockholder
- Regulatory agencies
- Project updates
- Capital projects
- Contracts
- Long term initiatives
- Any published document that:
- Is part of a regular process, e.g., weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually
- Incorporates data from enterprise systems
- Includes narrative commentary in addition to numbers and charts
- Narrative commentary needs to be authored by multiple people in collaboration
Benefits of Narrative Reporting
Narrative Reporting streamlines the report creation process by providing access to multiple data sources. Oracle reveals that Narrative Reporting can "integrate data from nearly any source into narrative report packages and provides the ability to separate the publishers of data content (charts, graphs, and grids) from the narrative authors tasked with providing the business commentary."
Oracle's Narrative Reporting allows organizations to prepare for and meet their reporting needs. Reports can be sent to shareholders faster with the most current narrative that provides critical context to the financial data. If you are interested in learning more about how Oracle's EPM Cloud Narrative Reporting can help your organization gain reporting confidence, we recommend talking with one of Accelalpha's expert consultants by requesting a consultation.