Accountants predominantly rely on the holy trinity of accounting reports: income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements. While these reports provide a snapshot of a company’s financial health, they’re not exhaustive and don’t include the crucial details that can help improve business strategy and day-to-day operations.
The transaction data behind the three financial statements contains valuable customer behavior details, like the number of returns and refunds, that you can use to inform business strategies better. For example, data on the number of refunds in a given period can help you advise colleagues in legal and go-to-market teams to adjust return policies and shorten the timeframe or offer store credit instead of a monetary refund so there are fewer fluctuations in revenue and higher margins.
To provide more nuanced advice and insights, you need to dig deeper than the three financial statements and use transaction data to uncover information that isn't immediately apparent in the financial reports. Below, we’ll explore some often overlooked reports that can illuminate various facets of your business, helping steer decision-making processes and future strategies.
Gain actionable insights from financial data
Here are some critical revenue data reports that can help you collaborate better with your cross-functional peers:
Sales revenue by country or region
This report can help your business operate better globally by providing insight into which regions and countries drive the most revenue. This information can help your marketing team tailor advertising dollars, and your sales team determine where to spend most of their time and how to allocate and define territories. Additionally, you can use this information to inform which new markets your business should pursue further.
Accounts receivable concentration by customer
Using accounts receivable concentration by customer can help you identify outstanding payments that your Customer Success or Account Management team needs to follow up on. Similarly, you could overlay accounts receivable aging data on top of this report to see how long it takes for your customers to pay your invoices. These insights can inform your billing strategy and determine how to adjust the net payment terms in your contracts.
Sales revenue by product
Knowing which products are your best sellers and which are underperforming can provide crucial insights into customer preferences and market trends. This report informs product development on which products need the most roadmap focus, marketing strategy on where to focus the most marketing efforts and advertising dollars, and how to allocate inventory (if you sell physical products) so you’re not overspending on products that few customers purchase, and sales strategy to determine where to focus the sales team’s efforts. Insights from this report can help ensure that your company capitalizes on its best products without overinvesting into products that don’t sell as well.
Summarized journal entries by account
Insight into real-time summarized journal entries by account can provide information on trends and allow you to detect irregularities over time. This information can also help maintain the integrity of your financial records and verify that all transactions were correctly captured and recorded in an aggregated manner.
Contract status
Keeping track of customer contract status, including signature dates, termination dates, and renewal terms, can help provide Accounting and Finance teams with crucial insights for revenue recognition and what constitutes “product or service delivery.” Applying this information to revenue data can help Finance project future performance and develop more accurate forecasts. Contract data can help eliminate unnecessary surprises at month-end or unplanned fluctuations in revenue.
How to overcome report creation challenges
Getting to this data and then building these reports can seem nearly impossible. Typically, gathering and analyzing data requires a ton of manual effort, and other crucial accounting tasks like closing the books or preparing for audits are always a higher priority.
Reporting at this level is challenging for several reasons. It starts with getting access to this data, which usually involves going straight to the source system - like a data warehouse, aggregating and standardizing the data into one format, appending missing details, and then making it usable by building the charts for analysis. And after all that, it’s only a snapshot of time. That process must be followed whenever you want to analyze the data again. It’s unsustainable, and no doubt inhibits you from moving quickly or employing agile decision-making to keep up with your customers or the market.
The good news is that there is an easier, more efficient way to quickly access this valuable data and visualize it based on your business needs. The answer is Leapfin.
Leapfin helps accounting teams transform transaction data from multiple sources into unified accounting records and balanced journal entries. Leapfin also offers Advanced Reporting, the business intelligence add-on that can help you create revenue data reports to draw actionable business insights and drive daily business decisions. With Advanced Reporting, you can:
- Use one of the pre-built templates or create custom reports to analyze your accounting data.
- Centralize access to real-time revenue reports to empower everyone on your team with information that reflects the actual state of the business.
With Leapfin, you can uncover key customer behavior trends and insights without manual data uploads, data manipulation, or extra effort, all in the same place where you conduct month-end reporting.
Ready to uncover new insights in your data? Request a demo today.
