Financial reporting: companies still lack key reporting data.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: BusinessBRIEFS - Brief Article

Despite all the attention paid to speeding up and improving the quality of financial reporting, most companies still say they have problems. In a study of more than 200 companies by Ventana Research:

* 80 percent of respondents indicated they were missing some critical information from periodic reports.

* Basic data that firms have traditionally collected is abundant, yet leading indicators about their company's or business unit's future performance was unavailable to more than half of the respondents.

* 57 percent of companies take more than five days to close the books; 73 percent believe it should be four days or less.

* Spreadsheets are a root cause of longer closing cycles. Fewer than 10 percent of...