Regulatory reporting is a crucial task for every business organization. These reports are essential for communicating business information together with relevant data while addressing stakeholders’ concerns. Regulatory bodies expect timely filing of accurate reports and ensure proper implementation of legal corrective steps.
To build an efficient regulatory reporting system, you must have the right regulatory reporting goals. Unfortunately, due to the lack of awareness, many businesses find it difficult to make their regulatory business reporting more effective.
Regulatory Reporting Goals
As mentioned above, having the right reporting goals is primarily important to build an effective system. The following are four main goals your team should focus on –
- Clear communication of information (financial, ESG, CSR, etc) and explanations
- Communication of comprehensive data, commentary complying with reporting requirements, and addressing possible investor concerns
- Providing accurate information on the completeness, amount, and compliance with accounting standards and reporting requirements
- Meeting the filing deadlines
Teams usually rely on a combination of people, processes, data, and technology to achieve these goals.
Building an Efficient Regulatory Reporting System for Your Business
You can do the following things to make your regulatory reporting process faster, easier, and more efficient.
Automating with Technology
Automation often facilitates accuracy and speed, but much more than that, it helps enhance financial services organizations’ reporting functions. It becomes easier when automated reporting processes are combined with technology-powered agile data management.
The heavy dependence on manual processes that comes into play, along with a high level of redundancy, in the absence of automation, affects the reporting system. However, you can use a financial management system that supports automation for providing audit capabilities and management control and for managing attestation, aggregation, and report submission.
Apart from this, using the right FMS can also help you in:
- Implementing transaction approval policy
- Assigning user permissions by role
- Categorizing accounts and transaction
- Building strong controls around period
All these functions further help you in enhancing your regulatory reporting process.
Collaborating with the Right Teams and Departments
Regulatory reporting requires teamwork and is not a one-person task. The team that handles regulatory reporting often leads the process in terms of establishing reporting controls and processes and setting milestones and timelines, among other things.
But, the process requires a collaborative effort from different IT, risk, and finance departments. In addition, inputs from various teams, such as legal experts, data and commentary contributors, internal and independent auditors, and accounting policy teams, are also required for this process.
Creating a Centralised Data Repository
You have to ensure consistency, validation, integrity, and quality of data in order to achieve efficient regulatory reporting. This process begins with combining data silos that already exist within the organization.
An efficient way to bring this off is a centralized data repository. For example, financial management systems that serve the financial services industry — allow them to integrate with other business systems so they can access all of their data in one place.
With capabilities for identifying data inconsistencies, the accounting software also allows you to perform a reconciliation process across reports, thereby ensuring data quality.
Sticking to a Proven Process
You can achieve consistent results by following a way of applying standards and practices provided by processes and procedures. The best regulatory reporting protocols follow effective processes and procedures.
For example, there must be processes for communicating feedback and progress, identifying errors, building support practices and proper documentation, and identifying and resolving any issues that might mislead the reporting process.
The right process is also necessary for identifying data requirements and retrieval steps. Such a process will allow you to optimize data accuracy while ensuring prompt access to data.
Thus, every organization can build an efficient regulatory business reporting system by having the right reporting goals and following the above tips.
If you are looking for a full-featured business reporting tool that can be easily integrated into your business, contact us at Semansys. Our automated, flexible, and result-oriented processes enable quality business reporting that is always up to standards and leaves no more compliance headaches for you.