Flagship Reporting Challenges when

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Searle Goott, CEO and founder, Flagship Reporting

Our company was founded by Searle Goott, an ex. Ernst & Young Chartered Accountant with 30 years’ experience working as a Financial Director for various companies (both enterprise and SME’s). Flagship was born out of frustration with the lack of available reporting tools to enable the automation and customisation of management reports, KPI’s and other key accounting reports.

Challenges when consolidating multiple companies

Using spreadsheets to manually report on consolidated companies is a long winded process with way too many opportunities to make errors...

Not only that but this creates a snapshot of

information and to see an up to date report the whole procedure has to be repeated. Add multiple currencies, inter-company transactions and an excessive amount of organisations and the task just becomes a drain on valuable time.

How our app can help you

The clearest benefit is the time saved, by saving on average 2 days per report, with potentially lots of clients all wanting monthly reports, the cost of consolidated reporting is huge. Even then, without Flagship, you are relying on the work of humans which as everyone knows will never be perfect and eventually errors will be found in reports or at least time be spent ensuring there aren’t. Flagship does all the hard work for you, pulling figures from your accounting system and into a report for you.

Ability to edit exchange rates:

such a process that you lose the ability to tailor reports to specific requirements including the complications of exchange rates. We are proud to support almost 100 currencies to make sure wherever a company may be operating we can create reports for them. Without the need for any manual input Flagship will deal with all currency conversions for you making the once complex task remarkably simple. If custom exchange rates are desired it is easy to manually edit them to give absolute control over the report that is being created.

Eliminations of intercompany transactions:

Transactions between organisations, whether they are for loans or management fees, can make these reports even more of a nightmare to create. Flagship allows the user to set up eliminations effortlessly. Doing this allows you to gain a better insight into the performance of a group of companies as there are no interactions between them causing the report to be misleading.

There is a series of errors typically made when attempting to put together consolidated reports regardless of the process chosen. For a start, the ability to easily switch between default exchange rates and custom ones is often neglected and is vital to having complete control of the report being created. When comparing budgets to actuals it is important.

Common errors made with multi currency consolidations

• Using automated v manual exchange rates • Using incorrect exchange rates for budgets and forecasts • Excluding certain accounts to be revalued (eg investments and share capital) • Converting opening retained earnings. This is a commonly made mistake as the earnings should be the sum of prior years profits at appropriate exchange rates and not a balance converted at a single exchange rate.

Lastly the effect of all of the above should aggregate into a CTA account and more importantly the user should understand the make of this account.

FIND OUT MORE...

Book a demo:

flagshipreporting.com/booka-demo

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apps.xero.com/app/flagshipreporting

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