The best reason to implement an ERP system is increased visibility. Increased visibility in your company leads directly to better process control and risk mitigation. That translates to more profitable projects that finish on time and under budget. There are many ways to use the extra data you create and capture to grow the bottom line but it's also a valuable resource that will help prepare your company for the future. Reports are a practical and efficient way to access the increased visibility provided by an ERP. Your system should be able to instantly pull a wide range of information and format it into easy to read reports. There's a number of third party tools to make this process easier or that integrate directly into your ERP. It can be difficult to set up an effective report creation process so let's take a look at some of the essentials. Olsen Consulting has both experience and expertise in custom report creation and we would be happy to guide you through the process. Contact us for a free consultation. The bare minimum of accounting function is a profit/loss report, balance sheets, trial balance and trading summaries. Consider some advanced functionality for your general ledger as well. A popular option we provide is the ability to drill down from the general ledger all the way to individual transactions in clean logical steps. We find that a custom set up like this catches many common accounting errors and leads to perfect tie outs at the end of the month. Forecasting and cash flow reports are also critical must-haves. These reports will help you to manage and measure revenue against risk and keep tabs on your cash flow. Easy access to historical performance can act as an early warning system for projects that run into trouble as well as improve the margins on your next bid. Payroll and HR can be incredibly labour intensive. The right set of reports can give your staff the head room they need to keep things running smoothly and to prepare your company for growth. Set up custom reports for tracking time sheets and labour costs that help you avoid fines and penalties. You can design reports to monitor compliance for different jurisdictions. Imagine being able to react with speed and confidence to any change in legislation. Reports are a great way to track and manage your assets with better accuracy. Many ERPs come with out of the box reports for depreciation and operating leases. Custom reports for profitability are generally easy to set up depending on how repair and maintenance cost records are kept. Olsen Consulting also offers some advanced location and billing tools built with machine learning that are ideal for operations with multiple work sites and large numbers of workers and machines. Every report that you create should have the ability to drill down into a detailed level. They should offer a clean excel export option for advanced analysis and they should allow you to catch and correct errors in real time. If your reports don't offer this kind of functionality contact us for a free consultation.