Built on twenty-five years of closing the books.
Reporting software is usually built from the software side. It starts with someone who knows how to process data and then asks controllers what they need. With ReportNow! it was the other way round: the requirements come from first-hand controlling practice. Behind most of the design decisions lies a close in which something went wrong.
The second source is feedback from day-to-day use at our customers. It now carries more weight than the first.
Both sides of the table
More than twenty-five years in controlling and finance leadership, alternating between both sides: in operating companies across different industries, in subsidiaries and in parent companies, in holding companies and in funds. Sometimes the reporting was one’s own work; sometimes it was requested from a portfolio company and did not arrive.
What you get from it
A report has to meet two demands that pull in opposite directions. Whoever prepares it must be able to trace every figure back to the individual posting. Whoever receives it wants to read it in thirty seconds. Many tools serve only one of the two sides and are either a database with a user interface or a dashboard of tiles with no postings behind it.
- The group view queries all companies in one step. Nobody has to copy workbooks together for it.
- In the group view, the sales report eliminates intra-group revenue and shows it with amount and counterparty. No revenue figure is reduced without notice.
- The rows of the reports can be expanded, in the P&L and balance sheet down to the individual posting, where the books provide individual postings. A question from the advisory board can be answered directly in the report instead of spending half a day searching.
The full closing calendar
The work covered monthly, quarterly and year-end closes, both prepared and received from others, as well as five-year plans for shareholders and banks, annual budgets and in-year forecasts. Every week there was also the liquidity forecast, which is not a close and still has to be right every Friday.
What you get from it
Reporting that only knows actuals covers half of the work, because the other half belongs to planning. A plan must also still be traceable in January. If by then nobody can say how a plan figure came about, it carries no weight in the discussion with the bank.
- Actuals, budget and forecast stand side by side and are never added together. In the data series “Actual + plan”, every month after the actuals cut-off shows the plan, without adding a part-month of actuals.
- Every plan row records its source, for example rolled forward from actuals, loaded from a plan file, in Sales taken from the pipeline, or in Financials transferred from sales planning, HR planning, loans and taxes.
- The roll-forward uses only months up to the actuals cut-off you have set. If a part-month were counted as a full one, the plan would come out too low without anyone noticing.
- The liquidity forecast starts from the bank balance and continues with the cash flow statement of the plan variant, including what Sales, HR, Loans and Taxes have transferred to the financial plan. When the money flows is governed by payment terms; for customer payments, ReportNow! suggests the term based on the actual days to pay of the receivables.
Due diligence, from both ends
In dozens of transactions, on the buy side as well as the sell side, data rooms were filled and worked through, question lists answered and drawn up. On both sides it became clear where things get stuck.
What you get from it
Most of the time in a due diligence goes into showing how a figure came about. Whoever can no longer show it ends up negotiating their credibility instead of the price. Reporting whose past changes with every import is of no help then.
- Imported balances cannot be changed by hand. A reclassification is a posting under a document that must net to zero on its own; it remains visible and can be deleted again.
- You close a reported month per company. Whatever the books post afterwards appears with the next import as a late posting in the next open month. Your January looks in May just as it did in February.
- The balance sheet check and the cash flow check sit directly below the report. Whoever has to present them does not need to recalculate them first.
Grants: application, evidence, audit
Over the years, a large number of grant applications were handled, from the documents through submission to the follow-up questions. On the company side, the audits of how the funds were used followed, in which it becomes clear whether the documents hold up.
What you get from it
In the end, the evidence decides whether a grant holds. What is required is hours per person and day, payroll costs per project and how they were derived. Typical reporting tools do not hold this information, because controlling does not need it. As a result, it usually ends up in an Excel workbook next to the system and often does not stand up to the audit.
- Time sheets per person and month, day by day. Working days, public holidays of the relevant federal state, company holidays and reported absences are taken into account, even half a day of annual leave.
- Project shares per cost centre or per person, each with a first and last month. A new share from April does not change January.
- Project costs come from the same payroll data as the HR report. There are therefore never two different figures for the same person.
- The time sheet is produced as a PDF with fields for date and signature and does not have to be retyped.
Every company was different
The companies were never alike: a different industry, a different size, a different chart of accounts. Each had a reporting workbook built up over the years, in which the rows were named the way the business called them.
What you get from it
A reporting tool with a fixed standard often looks best during selection. Four weeks into live use, someone is maintaining a workbook alongside it again, because the familiar row is missing. That is why almost nothing in ReportNow! is fixed.
- ReportNow! recognises SKR03, SKR04 and IKR from your balances. It also shows how reliable the recognition is.
- You set up the structure, account ranges, dimensions, hierarchies and row sequences yourself, without any programming.
- A German GAAP (HGB) structure and a management structure can exist side by side. Both are calculated from the same balances and end with the same result for the period.
- You adapt the structure from the catalogue until the rows are named as in your existing Excel workbook.
Twenty-five years do not cover every case.
Companies post differently, advisory boards have their own questions, and every bank wants its ratios defined slightly differently. That is why the second part of ReportNow! takes shape in customers’ day-to-day use. Improvements appear every few weeks, not just with the next annual release.
The roadmap follows the answers
The questionnaire you receive after booking an appointment asks, among other things, about your biggest unsolved reporting problem. These answers, and the software customers use for their bookkeeping, determine which import interfaces and reports are built next. How widespread a format is in general does not decide it.
Every customer gets the extensions
An extension is not a change request with its own quote and its own deadline. It is built and becomes available to all customers with the next release, included in the price. The reason is practical: special versions for individual customers drift apart, and at some point someone would no longer receive an improvement they have paid for.
Frequent questions first
If someone has to ask, the application expects something it should not take for granted. We fix that in the application, not with training. The most frequent questions are therefore at the top of the list.
We look for a reported error everywhere
We do not fix a reported error only where it occurred. We also look for where the same assumption is hidden elsewhere; it usually turns up in two or three other modules, where it had gone unnoticed. That takes more time the first time round and saves you from reporting the same error again somewhere else.
Six questions to put to any provider.
Feature lists look good everywhere. What matters more is what happens to your data and figures when something goes wrong. Here are our answers, so that you can compare.
Who owns the data?
You do. Each customer’s data is held in a file of its own, kept apart from everyone else’s. You can export reports yourself at any time as PDF, Excel or CSV. On request, we provide your complete data in open formats.
Where is it held?
In a data centre in the European Union, operated by a German provider. No data is transferred to third countries. Processing is governed by a data processing agreement under Art. 28 GDPR.
How long are you committed for?
You can use it free of charge for the first 14 days, without payment details. After that you choose the term: 1 month, 3 months (5 % discount) or 12 months (10 % discount), counted from the day you conclude the contract. The first term is agreed when you conclude the contract; after that you can cancel up to 14 days before the next term begins, effective at the end of the current one. There is no setup fee and no minimum volume.
How do you notice that a figure is wrong?
From the cross-checks that ReportNow! shows directly in the reports. In the financial report, these are the balance sheet check and the cash flow check against the change in cash and cash equivalents. The HR report also sets the payroll costs from the payroll data against the staff costs in the P&L, so that an unexplained difference stands out.
What happens with late postings?
After the monthly report, you close the month for each company. Anything the accounts team posts to that month afterwards appears as a difference in the next open month. A closed month therefore no longer changes when you re-import the accounting data later.
And if something is missing?
Then ReportNow! reports the gap instead of making an assumption. The financial report shows the number and amount of accounts with postings but no line in the structure. Values without a mapping, such as a customer without a country, appear under Sales › Setup › Missing mappings until you map them.
Talk to someone who has closed the books.
In the demo we spend 30 minutes going through the reports, guided by your questions rather than a demo script. You will not need to explain to us what an accrual is.