A month-end report pack run order that holds up

The problem

The ledger is closed, but the report pack for the CFO, the board or department leaders still takes days. Reports get run one by one, by whoever remembers them, in whatever order the day allows. A scheduled run can show success while reflecting data that wasn't current, and new accounts can quietly fall off the statements.

The solution

Write the pack down once, then run it the same way every close.

1. List every report in the pack. Trial balance, financial statements, management and department reports: one line each.
2. Set the run order. Reports that confirm the ledger is ready, or that feed other reports, come first. The financial statements follow, then management and department reports.
3. Name an owner and a backup for each report. The owner runs and checks it; the backup can do the same when the owner is out.
4. Check scheduled runs against the last posting. Compare each scheduled report's run time to the time of the final posting. A run that finished before the last posting needs to be run again.
5. Map new accounts. Confirm any account added this period appears on your statement rows.
6. Check parameters on the output. Read the period, entity, ledger and currency on the report output itself, not just on the setup screen. It takes ten seconds per report.
7. Tie the statements to the trial balance before the pack goes out.
8. Save to one place with one naming rule. Include the report name and period in every file name, so last month's version is easy to compare and nobody asks which file is final.
9. Log what went wrong. Note anything that broke this month so it can be fixed before next month.

Can't do all of it yet? Start with the run order and the owners. Those two changes alone remove much of the waiting from close week.

How it was checked

This is a working routine rather than a one-off test result, so check it in your own environment. A good test: at your next close, have the backup run the pack from the written list alone. If every report comes out in order, with the right period and entity on each output and the statements tied to the trial balance, the routine holds up.

Shared by

Shared by the ECS Reporting Solutions team. Adapted from our article How to Speed Up Your Month-End Report Pack in CloudSuite. Have a better way to do this, or a solution for a related problem? Share it with the community.