Record to report
Record to report or R2R is a Finance and Accounting management process which involves collecting, processing and delivering relevant, timely and accurate information used for providing strategic, financial and operational feedback to understand how a business is performing. It also covers the steps involved in preparing and reporting the overall accounts which are typically stored in a general or nominal ledger and managed by a controller. The detailed steps involved are:
- data extraction
- data collection
- data validation
- data transformation
- voucher posting
- storing vouchers in de-normalized and compressed format
- generating analysis account trial balance or consolidated analysis account trial balance
- generating user-defined financial and management reports
In accounting terms an ideal IT platform would be one which presents the data management need at the press of a button, however, various factors such as legacy systems, complexity, changing information needs and so on usually mean a team is needed on an ongoing basis to ensure the correct format reports are prepared.
What to expect in such a report:
- financial performance and position
- key performance indicators/metrics
- business commentary on the performance
- reconciliation of actual results to budget, forecast and prior year results
- invoice to payment, or P2P
- collect to cash, or O2C
- manage fixed assets
- manage internal financial controls