Understand Your Business With Management Reporting Software and Analysis

What Will You Wish You Had Recorded Six Months From Now?

Different businesses need to understand performance in different ways.

A construction company may want to compare jobs or sites. A retailer might care about locations. Another business may want to analyse departments, sales reps, product lines or cost centres.

Big Red Cloud’s Analysis Categories and User Defined Fields let you capture that additional information as the accounting happens. With support for up to 60 Analysis Categories per book, there is considerable flexibility to structure the data around the questions your business is likely to ask.

The important decision comes early:

What will you want to know about this transaction later?

Capture that information now and it remains available when you want to understand performance months or years afterwards.

Ask the Books Your Own Questions

Standard financial reports such as Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet and Trial Balance give you the headline view. Often, the useful question comes next.

Which suppliers make up this cost? How much have we spent on a particular job? What happened at one location? Which transactions sit behind this balance?

Book Enquiry lets you interrogate the underlying transactions in Big Red Cloud instead of relying only on predefined reports.

Choose the accounting book and period you want to examine, group the transactions in different ways, show the detail or just the totals, and export the results to Excel when you want to take the analysis further.

This becomes particularly powerful when useful information was captured at transaction entry.

For example, if a construction business records the relevant site or job against its transactions, Book Enquiry can later be used to examine the costs associated with that work and group the underlying transactions in useful ways.

Customers who have not used Book Enquiry before often discover that the information they wanted was already sitting in the accounts — they simply needed a better way to interrogate it.

Instead of asking:

“Does Big Red Cloud have a report for this?”

start with:

“What do I want to understand?”

See Several Companies Together

If your business operates through several companies, looking at each one individually may not tell you how the wider group is performing.

Big Red Cloud includes multi-company consolidation for Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet and Trial Balance reporting across multiple companies.

That gives owners and finance teams a combined financial view while preserving the individual company accounts underneath it.

Consistent accounting and analysis structures across those companies make the combined view even more useful.

Set It Up Properly From the Start

The difficult part of management information is often deciding which information will matter before you need the answer.

You don’t have to work that out by yourself.

Our Customer Success team can help you understand how Analysis Categories, User Defined Fields, reporting and Book Enquiry can fit the way your business operates. The Knowledge Base provides step-by-step guidance when you need it.

Once the structure is there, you have different ways to use it: run the financial report for the formal view, interrogate the underlying transactions with Book Enquiry, or bring the accounts into a conversation with the AI assistant that already understands your wider context.

Capture the context. Interrogate the accounts. Ask the questions that matter.