Mike Dinsdale, vice president of finance for Velocity11, a manufacturer of robotics for the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, agreed to speak with BPM about his recent foray into reporting software. Velocity11 purchased a new ERP system, Visual Manufacturing from Lilly Software, last fall, then bought the Synoptix financial reporting package from CompuSoft Development. After trying for six months to implement Synoptix, Dinsdale worked with Pontifex Consulting to find a solution that would both work with Visual Manufacturing and meet Velocity11's long-term needs; they settled on an application from FRx Software. Here's his advice for avoiding beginner mistakes in implementing a financial reporting system.

BPM: You started out implementing one reporting package and ended up with another. What was the problem?

Mike Dinsdale: The Synoptix software is really simple to use, but it is not powerful. We couldn't get it to generate the reports we needed, and it had a lot of problems with maintenance. You have to actually up-keep all of the reports. So, say you had a profit-and-loss statement report and you had 10 variations on it. In Synoptix, you'd have to actually maintain all of them. If I added an account to one -- added an account to my P&L -- then I'd have to go back, and every single time that account appeared in all those reports, I'd have to add it in again. In Microsoft FRx, you add it once and then it updates everything.

BPM: If you had the purchase to do over again, how would you do things differently?

Dinsdale: We had never implemented a reporting package before, and I don't think we fully understood what we needed. I don't think we spent enough time at the beginning figuring out: Is this going to do everything we want? Once you've got all the reports, how easy is it to maintain them? How easy is it to create them? And how do you get them out to people? Doing a demo and seeing it work is important. You want something that's powerful, that has a scheduler and distributes the reports from the server side. We didn't look into those kinds of things enough. The whole point of having good reports and information is that it gets to people easily, and I think you forget that when all you're trying to do at the beginning is create financial statements.

BPM: How do you think reports should be distributed?

Dinsdale: Let's say I have a package of reports for my board of directors. In the past, I'd have to actually make the board package each time. I want to get to the point where I can schedule packages of reports for different groups of people to run automatically, and then either distribute them through the Web or e-mail them.

We've automated reports that we used to make in Excel. Gross margin reports, inventory reports, we're doing in Microsoft FRx, which is G/L based. But we also need Crystal Reports to go into the transactions in the database because our G/L does not capture the transaction details.

BPM: Can you drill down at all?

Dinsdale: You can drill down, depending on what you do. In our case, we can't drill down very far because our ERP batches all the transactions and then posts them, so we can't go through that level. But even outside of that, let's say you need to have bookings reports or inventory transaction reports, you can't do that in most financial reporting packages. You have to go to some other package to get a full line of reports.

BPM: What, then, are the benefits of deploying a financial reporting package?

Dinsdale: The end result is that you spend time doing what you're supposed to be doing, which is actually looking at the data and analyzing it, not making it. Typically for each board meeting, before I had a reporting package, it would take me four days to pull together the financial information the board needed. Now it takes me three hours, and I can provide twice as much in those three hours as I could before in four days. So I can spend two days looking at it and coming up with better answers and strategies than I would have otherwise. Not only that, but you can get it out to people much faster, so they can have it four or five days before a board meeting, instead of one day. This allows everyone to be more prepared, as well as informed.

Another benefit of Microsoft FRx is that it can make cash flow statements. If you have the P&L and the balance sheet and you still have to sit down and make the cash flow, that's hard. As you're going through a close, you can't look at things in real time and decide if you need to make adjustments because it's a pain to make the cash flow report again. With a reporting package that generates cash flow reports, you just make a change and it's updated for everybody. I can't believe that people don't spend more time on getting these things dialed in. It just makes such a big difference.

BPM: What benefits have you seen outside of finance?

Dinsdale: The problem when it's distributed through people is they forget and they don't do it on time. People in the business units can't count on it; they don't use the company's financial reports to manage because they're never sure if they will show up. If the same report comes every day at 8 a.m., sent by a computer system, people count on it, and they'll use it.

BPM: How have Velocity11's business managers reacted?

Dinsdale: It's incredible. Just getting the information out in front of people means that they look at it, and so you get a lot more involvement in what's happening on the finance side of managing the company. And to me, that's a massive benefit.