Deploy These 6 Tips to Accelerate your Management Reporting Following a Merger

A thoughtful list of 5 tips to help organizations optimize their reporting in the M&A environment was released by Michael Hofer. We have added a 6th tip to help you accelerate your reporting strategy on your next acquisition target.

Here are the 6 tips:

1. Define the timing of the IT integration 
2. Align significant accounting policies 
3. Set up templates to integrate managing reporting 
4. Include operational KPIs and value drivers
5. Align the reporting calendars and focus on critical reports 
6. Prior to M&A activity set up a cube-driven FP&A Platform

The last tip is explained further here:

The acquiring company should deploy a modern FP&A platform that is data cube driven. This architecture provides an optimal data environment to more easily receive incoming financial and operational data from any acquisition target. 

Think about it, if your own house is not in order and you lack a centralized system where you manage your financial data, how can you expect to bring in new data from an entirely new entity with ease? 

In a cube-drive FP&A platform, you will already have all existing financial data organized into dimensions and hierarchies. One key dimension you will capture if you’re active in M&A is ‘ENTITIES’. This dimension will create governance around the consolidation (“roll-up”) of all your entities. Proper roll-up around this dimension is critical to facilitate your consolidated management reporting. Once a new company is acquired, you can more easily map the new entity to your existing Entities Dimension and this will greatly facilitate your reporting process following an acquisition. 

Read more detail on the first 5 tips 

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