Today, controlling and reporting, as a continuously developing, now independent and crucial service function, is increasingly present in the product ranges of business consulting and service companies.
Drawing on decades of expertise and extensive professional experience, WTS Klient provides a wide range of controlling and reporting services in line with international standards and our clients’ internal policies, in the fields of both development and operations.
We help our clients achieve their business goals through analysing the complex controlling solutions required and the financial information extracted from them, in a way that is not only reactive, but also adaptive and proactive. All while creating value, and increasing the value of the company.
As with the other services in WTS Klient’s financial management division, our outsourced solution in the area of controlling gives our clients access to a much broader base of knowledge and technology than if they had hired a separate controller for this area. Both in terms of design and operation, this results in higher quality and more efficient systems where costs are recouped.
In our experience, due to the development and growth of a given business, existing controlling systems often have to be adapted because they can no longer be expanded, and thus do not adequately serve the increasing complexity of the activity, its current size or more complex structure. When laying the foundations, we therefore pay particular attention to the aspects of perspectives, extensibility and scalability in order to avoid having to lay new foundations for the controlling system at developmental-growth milestones.
Designing and operating controlling systems
We design controlling systems based on custom project engagements, in line with our clients’ requirements. As a first step, our experts assess the existing controlling and reporting processes, keeping in mind what they deem optimal for the given organisation and activity. After this assessment, we propose how the existing system can be adapted to meet future needs, or whether a completely new system may need to be developed. During the development, our professionals take care of the interfaces, migration, optimising the accounting coding, data collection methodology, and then finally we handle the testing, deployment, user training and go live.
When running controlling systems, our experts operate the installed system and take on the following tasks:
- Monthly financial reporting: active participation in monthly and annual general ledger closings; preparation of income statements, balance sheets and cash flow statements based on accounting data, as well as business division and cost centre reports, actively using additional company databases (inventory, HR, production, etc.)
- Planning: budgeting, forecasting (compiling and coordinating the preparation of the company’s annual financial and other plans; preparing intra-year, e.g. quarterly forecasts in a fast changing business environment), business planning, preparing long-term financial plans (preparing 3-5-10 year business plans as required by owners and investors), business simulations (“What if…” type analyses, sensitivity analyses)
- Analysis: balance sheet, income statement and detailed plan/actual cash-flows, year-on-year analyses, sales, purchases, inventories/COGS, production, corporate overheads, tangible assets, capex, working capital and capital analysis
- Individual financial and economic decision making: supporting management with ad-hoc business analysis needs, identifying loss potential, developing process-improvement ideas, calculating returns on investment
- Prime cost calculation: running prime-cost calculation models (pre- and post-calculations) for production companies
Technological implementation of our controlling service
With our controlling service we use a business intelligence (BI) based system to generate reports and analyses interactively, linked to the company’s accounting and various other data sources. The BI system effectively supports the flow of information within the company, making operations more transparent and avoiding manual processes. The latter not only eliminates or minimises errors, but also proves to be a more cost-effective solution for producing reports that require significant human resource input.
As part of our controlling solution, our clients can use PowerBI, a custom software development solution from our Business Automation developers and our strategic partner for BI software. PowerBI’s illustrative graphical displays allow us to draw conclusions that were previously hidden by the data collection process, but the system allows us to build a dashboard of graphs that continuously shows the performance of our clients’ businesses according to different monitoring criteria.