You might think of a management report that you can use that currently doesn’t come off your system, but should you run right to IT (Information Technology) and get a program?

I would suggest, perhaps, not.  Let’s give the report idea some time to work through the various stages going from manual to automatic.  The steps we can see are:

1.  The idea for the report.

2.  Perhaps, scratching out the report on a piece of paper.

3.  Producing the report manually in Microsoft Excel or some other tool.

4.  Taking a look at the input for the report and streamlining the input process.

5.  Doing other customizations on the report to modify it as you get experience with using it.

6.  Doing any further automation on the report in its semiautomatic mode.

7.  Having it programmed into your system as a custom report and turning into a completely automatic process.

So, you see by jumping right to having a program through information technology, you could be bypassing several steps, but there might be some cost in the process.  Among the reasons why going right to a program report would not make sense are:

1.  As you work with the reports, you learn some things about what you want.  You also learn some things about how good are some of the inputs that would feed the report.

2.  When you aren’t quite sure of a particular report, you could end up wasting some IT resources and programming time.  The report could require a lot more programming changes from their side.

3.  By having gone through the report in Excel or some other tool, you’re going to have a much clearer picture to show the IT department on what needs to be programmed.  It should speed up the developmental effort.

4.  There’s going to be some lag time in waiting for the report to be produced from IT.  There could be a queue time to fit into the queue before it even gets started.  It also will take IT some time to produce the report.  In many cases, it’s going to be faster for you to produce it on a manual basis.  The benefit from the IT side is that they can program it, so you’re not having to recreate it manually or semi-automatically going forward.  But, to try to get a first version of the report, normally is going to be faster by you doing it manually rather than through the IT department.

Think of kids growing up.  Imagine they went right from being babies to being adults and what would get missed in the process.  Now, that’s a little bit of an extreme analogy, but there are things that can get missed by moving from thought idea to custom program report in IT right off the bat.  Consider taking the process of going through from idea to automatic in the various steps.  You could very well end up with a much stronger report that’s more to your liking and you make more efficient use of IT in the process.

Jon Paul, MBA, CPA, CMC, CM&AA

President, Value Added Finance Resources
Bringing new insights on results and maximizing company value