Which of these is how you report today?

Each report is produced by its own process, and each process carries its own fixed view of the organisation and the chart of accounts. The ledger itself holds only flat codes, so every change to the business means rebuilding the reports that depend on it.

You export the GL to Excel each month, map codes to reporting lines on mapping tabs, build the pack by hand and email the workbook. The work repeats every month, the mapping has to be kept up to date manually, and each emailed copy becomes another version of the truth.

Each report has its own rows, columns and code ranges. When the business adds a cost centre, every report that should include it has to be found and edited, and any report that is missed is silently wrong.

Your parent and subsidiaries run separate ledgers, each with its own chart of accounts. Every month each ledger is mapped to the group in a workbook, re-keyed and reconciled before anyone sees a group figure.

Every acquisition, disposal or reorganisation changes the reporting structure, and the new structure overwrites the old one. Last year's figures no longer compare like-for-like with this year's without manual restatement.

Reports come from an overnight run in fixed layouts, so you see yesterday's figures the next morning. A new question needs a new program or a manual extract, and the answer can take days.

Finance raises change requests that wait in an IT backlog, then pass through ETL changes, model rebuilds, testing and release. By the time the change is live, the business may have moved on.

Your EPM or BI model holds organisation and account hierarchies, typically loaded from the GL at period end. It holds one structure at a time, so after a reorganisation history is remapped or like-for-like comparison is lost, and access is usually licensed per user.

Your chart of accounts was designed for posting, so reports follow the account codes. Management asks for the business by division, region or responsibility, and each answer is rebuilt in a spreadsheet.

Your budget sits in a spreadsheet and actuals come from a GL export. Every variance report starts by matching codes, re-mapping lines that changed after the budget was set and checking the totals agree - days before any variance is explained.

Prior-year comparatives are a copy taken at the close. When an audit adjustment or a late journal is posted afterwards, the copy no longer agrees with the ledger, and the current pack has to be re-run.

Statutory accounts, the management pack and the board pack each keep their own mapping, their own copy and their own reconciliation of the same ledger, and over time the versions drift apart.

Budget holders ask finance for their figures. Finance runs the report, cuts it for each manager and emails it back, then repeats the work for every request - time spent distributing numbers rather than explaining them.

The trial balance is run, checked and run again, and ledger enquiries go one account at a time, so a late or misposted journal is often found only at review, when the close is nearly done.