The 10 Best Financial Reporting Software Tools for 2023

Financial reporting is the process of communicating your organizations financial performance to the business as a whole, including investors, creditors and regulators.

Companies create financial statements such as the balance sheet, income statement and cash flow statement to give a comprehensive view of its financial health to the organization and its stakeholders. Financial reporting may reveal trends and insights, which inform the business's stakeholders in strategic decision making.

Since financial reporting is a regulatory requirement for most companies, financial information requires supplementary commentary, which is then shared externally. The process is subject to accounting standards and filing deadlines.

To inform strategic decision making and comply with regulatory requirements, financial reporting must be accurate, thorough and up to date. If not, it can potentially lead the business's decision makers toward making bad decisions, or leave the organization exposed to regulatory violations. Using software to manage your financial reporting can help you avoid these mistakes.

So how do you know which financial reporting software is the best for your company's needs?

Read on for an overview of the markets ten best financial reporting software and tools. We'll dive deeper into the pros and cons of each to help you choose the solution your team needs to communicate your financial performance.

What Is Financial Reporting Software?

Modern FP&A and accounting teams leverage financial reporting software to meet regulatory requirements and to support the business in strategic decision making. G2 states that financial reporting software helps businesses analyze all of their financial data, giving them an accurate view of their fiscal health. Financial reporting capabilities are offered in a single corporate performance management (CPM) platform that includes features for budgeting and forecasting, financial close, financial planning and analysis and other FP&A processes. Financial reporting capabilities can also be offered as stand-alone solutions.

What Are the Benefits of a Good Financial Reporting Tool?

A financial reporting solution must have accurate, thorough and up-to-date data enabling your business to meet regulatory requirements and its decision makers to make good decisions for the business.

Modern FP&A and accounting teams invest in financial reporting solutions to accelerate reporting. A financial reporting solution automatically consolidates data from disparate source systems, reducing time spent on manual and time-consuming efforts, such as sourcing and manipulating data and preparing and customizing reports.

Automated consolidation removes the inevitability of data inaccuracies created from human data entry errors, which can compromise your regulatory reporting and compliance.

With accelerated and more accurate reporting, modern FP&A and accounting teams gain more time for analysis. Thats why good financial reporting solutions also include features that enable analysis of real-time analytics, such as ad hoc variance analysis capabilities, pre-built dashboards and AI-powered BI tools all in a secure cloud environment.

Key Features To Look for When Choosing Financial Reporting Tools

To enable your organization to make confident, data-driven decisions, your financial reporting solution should have:

• Integration with Microsoft Office applications
• Automated data aggregation
• Pre-built reporting templates and dashboards
• Easy-to-customize formulas, reports and dashboards
• Ad hoc variance analysis
• Ability to retrieve and analyze data in real-time, instantly obtaining insights and actionable information from a large volume of data
• Embedded BI and AI capabilities for further data analysis
• Threaded comments and supporting details
• Automated report distribution
• Board-ready financial statements
• Ability to handle inter company eliminations, currency conversion and other consolidation capabilities for consolidated reporting

Now let's get to the pros and cons of the markets ten best financial reporting solutions.

Best Financial Reporting Software Tools

1. Vena

Vena is a corporate performance management (CPM) suite developed to help finance and operations teams streamline their financial planning, budgeting, forecasting and reporting processes.

The software uses a combination of workflow management, reporting automation and predictive analytics to help organizations increase visibility into their finances, develop more accurate and responsive planning cycles and improve strategic decision making.

Key Functionality and What Vena Does Well

• The ability to create dynamic reports and manage budgets/forecasts in one centralized system
• Supports templated reports and the ability  to have more complex, customized reporting
• The end-user interface is intuitive and easy to use
• Can easily set permissions and restrictions to provide appropriate access to users across the entire company

Best For

Vena is suitable for companies working in Excel that want to automate their financial reporting processes and would like to have the choice of leveraging pre-built reporting templates or want the flexibility to create more complex customized reports.

Venas integrated financial statements (Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Statement) can save companies time so they can leverage Venas inherent analysis and insights capabilities.

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2. Planful

Planful is a cloud-based financial planning and analysis (FP&A) software that provides businesses with operational and financial intelligence tools to help manage their financial data, decision making and reporting. 

Key Functionality and What Planful Does Well

• Create and maintain customized reports with on-the-fly analysis
• Self-service help knowledge base as well as support staff
• User interface thats easy to navigate
• Security and permission controls

Best For

Planful is an option for companies looking to streamline planning and budgeting cycles, improve analytics and reporting and gain better insights into their financial performance.

Planfuls Weaknesses

• No dynamic dashboard functionality
• Can be challenging to create custom formulas, reports and dashboards depending on needs
• Structured planning disconnected from dynamic planning fragmented architecture and technology, duplicative and manual maintenance causes disconnected data and reporting

How Does Planful Compare With Vena

3. Anaplan

Anaplan is a cloud-based planning and performance management platform. It helps organizations, teams and individuals to rapidly connect their data and automate financial, operational and reporting processes faster and more accurately.

Key Functionality and What Anaplan Does Well

• Supports and creates complex models that calculate and monitor the end-to-end performance of a business
• Helps report and analyze the critical KPIs to top-level management
• The app hub helps drive solutions because of its wide variety of use case collections

Best For

Organizations looking to manage and optimize their business reporting processes, such as finance, sales, forecasting, supply chain and operations.

Anaplans Weaknesses

• Limited to three dimensions in Rows/Columns area
• Difficult to create flexible dependent filtering criteria (Filter A to show only values for Filter B and vice versa)
• Absence of robust reporting and dash boarding capabilities presents a significant challenge in tailoring reports to meet an organization's specific reporting requirements

How Does Anaplan Compare With Vena

4. Prophix

Prophix is an automated corporate performance management software, helping organizations streamline budgeting, planning, forecasting, reporting and analysis.

Key Functionality and What Prophix Does Well

• Automates tedious manual reporting processes and procedures
• Provides currency conversion capability, allowing users to easily report multiple currencies
• Advanced security capabilities and role-based reporting access permissions

Best For 

Prophix is designed to help medium-sized and large businesses streamline their financial reporting and analysis processes.

Prophixs Weaknesses

• Challenges with data importing and overall data management during deployment
• Template creation and updating can be challenging if multiple data views need to be incorporated; formulas don't point to specific intersections in the database
• Prophix can be slow to update when larger changes are made to data sets

How Does Prophix Compare With Vena

5. Workday Adaptive Planning

Workday Adaptive Planning is a cloud-based solution that helps organizations automate and streamline their reporting processes. The platform also offers reporting and analytics capabilities, as well as insights into workforce trends.

Key Functionality and What Workday Adaptive Planning Does Well

• Its one of the most customizable and user-friendly systems
• You can rapidly create ad hoc reports
• Intuitive interface and visual dashboards

Best For

Workday Adaptive Planning is a solution for companies looking for reporting capabilities that help to quickly identify changing conditions and prioritize tasks to maximize efficiency and collaboration.

Workday Adaptive Plannings Weaknesses

• Challenging to update models, add new departments or accounts or create new reporting hierarchies
• Custom reports require an Adaptive expert
• Real-time data reporting can be disrupted with complex KPIs and larger datasets

How Does Workday Adaptive Planning Compare With Vena

6. Datarails

Datarails is a cloud-based financial planning and analysis platform that automates financial reporting and planning.

Key Functionality and What Datarails Does Well

• Automated data analysis
• Easy-to-understand charts/graphs/data visualizations
• Quickly update data in the management reports

Best For

Datarails is best for consolidating and transforming financial reports for monitoring company and financial performance.

Datarails's Weaknesses

• Lacks significant workflow and collaboration capabilities
• Limited number of basic reporting templates
• Manual, inefficient processes that prevent scalability and cause reporting delays

How Does Datarails Compare With Vena

7. Cube

Cube is a financial planning & analysis (FP&A) platform designed to empower finance teams strategic decision making by streamlining and automating repetitive reporting tasks.

Key Functionality and What Cube Does Well

• Create custom models to map and store complex datasets
• Easy-to-use interface to build, configure and monitor models
• Pre-built data integrations to a select set of data sources

Best For

Cube is best used to manage lines of business in one centralized platform or for companies looking to spend less time on manual, repetitive tasks.

Cubes Weaknesses

• Limited audit trail; if others are working on the tool, you may need to wait before inputting your data
• When a new general ledger account is created, users have to manually map to parent
• Limited visual user interface, reporting and modules

How Does Cube Compare With Vena

8. Jedox

Jedox is a unified business planning and analytics platform that enables organizations to analyze and report on critical financial, operational and customer data.

Key Functionality and What Jedox Does Well

• Provides advanced security features that make sure your data is safe, secure and up to date
• Built to cater to different environments; it can be used on-premise or in the cloud to fit your unique requirements
• Enables users to collaborate and share data without ever leaving the Jedox platform

Best For 

Jedox is an option for decision makers looking to access real-time information quickly and accurately, enabling them to make quick and informed decisions. It is particularly helpful for reporting and forecasting that require integrated planning, budgeting and consolidation.

Jedox's Weaknesses

• Difficulty in creating/exploring ad hoc data analysis and visualization
• User permissions can only be set per database and cube level
• Limited reporting capabilities; Jedox only offers basic reporting tools

How Does Jedox Compare With Vena

9. Syntellis Performance Solutions

Syntellis is a software and analytics solutions provider used primarily by financial and healthcare organizations in the upper mid-market and enterprise space.

Key Functionality and What Syntellis Does Well

• Strong expertise in database administration and data engineering
• A team of knowledgeable and experienced consultants
• Includes benchmarking capabilities based on industry

Best For

Syntellis is best suited for large healthcare, higher education and financial institutions looking to streamline processes, simplify reporting and deliver data-driven insights for fast decision making.

Syntellis's Weaknesses

• Inflexible reporting without custom scripting has standard reports, but is difficult to create and add tailored reports
• Performance issues when querying larger tables and datasets
• Difficulty supporting scalability: adding reports when there are changes to business modeling or compliance reporting

How Does Syntellis Compare With Vena

10. OneStream

OneStream is a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) software solution designed to help large and mid-sized organizations streamline their financial and operational processes. 

Key Functionality and What OneStream Does Well

• Provides a unified corporate performance management platform that allows you to connect the financial and operational data
• Very powerful and flexible when creating reports and dashboards
• Offers strong financial consolidation and close capabilities to ensure visibility and accuracy throughout the entire financial cycle

Best For 

OneStream is an option for businesses looking for a powerful, unified solution to manage their corporate performance management across planning, consolidation and financial reporting processes.

OneStream's Weaknesses

• Requires significant onboarding: Not very easy to understand unless you have some knowledge and training from the ground level
• Transfer from on-premise to cloud SaaS can be complex due to the unique nature of the business
• Performance can be an issue with large entities and account structures

How Does OneStream Compare With Vena

Conclusion

Financial reporting software enhances the reliability, speed, compliance, analysis and scalability of vital financial reporting processes. This enables your business to make informed decisions, meet regulatory requirements, and optimize financial performance.

Without financial reporting software, it becomes more difficult to ensure compliance with accounting standards and regulations. Manual financial reporting processes are prone to errors, leading to inaccuracies in financial statements.

The lack of automation can result in delays in generating reports, hindering timely decision making. An absence of data analysis capabilities can also limit your business's ability to gain insights into its financial performance and make informed strategic decisions. 

Once you have evaluated the advantages and disadvantages of each financial reporting solution, involve your team in a consultation process to select the right platform for your organization.

Be sure to take time to listen and think through things carefully, as this is a massive step forward in your journey to build out a seamless and successful financial reporting process.

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