Best Practices for Managing your Month End Close with Cube Web Reports

In this article, we're sharing some best practices on how you can use Cube's web reports to enable your month-end close, and collaboration with your accounting team and business stakeholders.

As soon as accounting closes the books, you know that your CFO and leadership team want to see reports and analysis instantaneously. As much as we want to spit out our financial package immediately, we know that we need to understand what went into the numbers before we can report on and analyze them.

Reporting on the web can help with this. By defining reports in your Cube add-on, and publishing them to the web, you can speed up your month-end workflow by reviewing your numbers immediately after you import your latest data. You can also send your team to the same place every month, allowing them to skip the spreadsheet for a high-level review.

We recommend starting with a standard Budget vs Actual (BvA) template in the Web. To create this, go to Cube to build and publish your desired template. Don’t forget to format it the way you want--Cube will store your numbers, shading, bolded text, so it’s a visually appealing presentation.

Creating and publishing a BvA report

Once you’ve created this report, and after you’ve completed your latest Actuals import, fetch the latest data in the Web. You’ll be able to quickly spot any unexpected deviations from Budget. Share the same template with your accounting team for cases where there are accounts that appear to have incorrect balances 

Reviewing your BvA in the web

If accounting makes any updates to the numbers, you can simply re-import and re-fetch the data, directly on the web. Repeat this flow every time you import data, to drive understanding of your numbers.

Once your numbers are final, you can create and share more reports with your business users. Keeping your key partners (think Sales, Marketing, Product, and Engineering) informed on their departmental results is critical. Their familiarity with the numbers will drive better forecast accuracy, and they’ll be able to see the impact of their business objectives on the financials.

Creating a vendor-level BvA

The best part--your business users can open, filter, and update their data all from the web. No need to send a new spreadsheet!

Viewing your Departmental vendor BvA in the web