Make the Most of a Well-Designed COA with Cetova Reporting for JDE
At ACBM, our team has decades of experience with Chart of Account (COA) redesign and conversion projects. There are many benefits of having a well-designed COA, including the ability to easily add more business units and divisions. But at the end of the day, the thing that finance departments struggle with the most is getting the numbers they need when they need them and in a reporting format that makes sense. One of the most important reasons to go through this process is to improve the utility and visibility of data insights through reporting. In fact, our approach to designing a COA is to design it specifically to facilitate reporting.
Pro Tip: Once you’ve designed your COA correctly, with hierarchy and rollups, it should mimic your reporting requirements.
How Do You Maximize Your Investment in a New or Redesigned Chart of Accounts?
You want to be able to view accurate financial data at a high level and drill down to provide in-depth reporting for use at each level of the organization. With your existing COA, you may have to cherry pick what you need from the data and put it into a report. Reporting tools that integrate with your ERP offer a way to get more from your Chart of Accounts.
Not All Tools Deliver the Same Value for Creating Financial & Operational Reports
Adding a reporting tool on top of your ERP can offer an improvement in the ability to get the reporting and analytics you need. However, there is a lot of upfront work to define how the data is structured inside the tool, configure it, and build each report that you believe you will need. Generic reporting tools like Hyperion or Cognos may work on multiple ERP systems, but they can require a LOT of configuration and customization to get what you need.
The costs are high. It’s not unusual for organizations to spend as much on the implementation of the tool as they do on the tool itself. Some companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on the implementation of those tools, and the time needed to implement this reporting can be very lengthy.
Cetova Is a Better Option for JDE Users
Maximizing your COA investment is much easier with a reporting tool like Cetova, which is built specifically for the JDE EnterpriseOne platform. It is designed to automatically pick up and maintain the common report types businesses use, and makes it very simple to zoom in or out on specific areas of data for different user groups. For example, on an income statement, your organization might need to see the data sliced and diced at many different levels for public, director-level, or analyst-level reporting. Cetova can provide all of those different views within the same report.
Cetova automatically reads the hierarchy within the chart of accounts and traverses the data up and down the “tree” of data that naturally exists within a properly designed COA. As you go in deeper, the data set being reported on becomes narrower but more granular, delivering value for each department and users who need it.
Read how Cetova was a game changer for Turner Industries Group
"Writing concise reports manually before Cetova was an absolute abject nightmare, and I’m absolutely blown away by the amount of time I’ve cut down from making the entire process automated." - Ryan Caruso, Director of Financial Reporting
Benefits of Cetova for JDE COAs
Using a pre-integrated tool reduces the cost of reporting by 50% or more. Here are just a few of the additional ways Cetova stands out as the premier reporting tool for JD Edwards:
- Fast implementation (a couple of days)
- Eliminates manual report compilation
- Enables automatic report distribution
- No data warehouse needed
- Secure and compliant
- User-friendly drag-and-drop report design
Read more about Cetova reporting from ACBM here
What if you have an older COA? You don’t have to wait for a chart of accounts design and conversion project to start getting better reporting functionality. Even with an outdated chart of accounts, Cetova makes it easier to get the data you need from your system. By the same token, a well-designed COA makes reporting easier even if you don’t yet have Cetova in place. However, the power of the two together is even greater than either one alone.
Want to experience the synergy of Cetova and a great COA? Contact our team to discuss your options.