Miami Accountants Still Use Spreadsheets as a Crutch despite all the sophisticated tools at their disposal when it comes to financial reporting. More than 70% of Miami Accountants said they used spreadsheets to track and manage financial reporting on a daily basis.

Miami Accountants have already made a substantial investment in this area in the past 12 months moving away from spreadsheets. In the United States, 76% of executives use spreadsheets daily, while in the United Kingdom, 86% rely on them. The next three regions or countries with the highest usage were the Middle East (76%), Russia (74%), and Italy (55%).

“Miami Accountants rely heavily on spreadsheets even in the financial reporting process,” says Miami Accountant Gustavo A Viera. “We see a lot of spreadsheets being used in the budgeting, planning, and forecasting area. That’s an area that’s ripe for spreadsheets, but it did surprise us that with financial reporting we saw 72% [of executives] using spreadsheets in some way.”

Miami Accountants often use a dedicated application to consolidate data but tend to use spreadsheets to extract specific information or collect data across disparate financial systems. They also use spreadsheets to generate their actual financial statements. But this hybrid approach does not give Miami Accountants a comprehensive, clear view of all of the numbers generated by their financial-reporting processes. Within the C-suite, it’s a pressing concern. Almost 40% of the C- and VP-level said their effectiveness was impaired by limited visibility into financial-reporting data.

“They don’t have all the dimensional analytics that they need to be able to go on the earnings call and say, yes, margins were up here, and here are the product lines or customer segments or geographies that drove that,” says Miami Accountants Gustavo A Viera.

If a company looks at the financial-reporting function a bit more holistically, it will be better prepared, says Viera. “Too many companies are taking a piecemeal approach to invest in systems for the closing, reporting, and regulatory filing processes,” he says. Coming out of the downturn, he notes, companies realize they need to ensure their financial data ties to their management and performance data, so they can do a “root-cause analysis” into why a quarter ended the way it did.