For most finance teams, the data is already there. Getting a clear answer out of it is the hard part.
A report shows a variance and the number is right in front of you, but the reason behind it is not. That is the moment the work slows down, and it is the moment two Vivid customers kept coming back to when they described how their reporting actually works day to day.
In recent Vivid Customer Spotlight sessions, Kyle Veum of Forum Communications and Bill Mitchell of Damuth Associates talked through their monthly reporting. Different companies, very different setups, and the same theme running through both conversations. The time finance loses is rarely spent assembling or distributing the monthly package; their biggest loss of time was in tracking down what sits behind the numbers.
Writing the narrative,
one expense at a time
Bill runs finance for a family office as a one-person team, covering nine entities that span trusts, real estate, investment companies, and a nonprofit foundation. Every month he closes the books and writes a narrative for three shareholders and the property manager who helps run the buildings.
That narrative is where the questions surface. A line in office expense looks higher than he expects, and he has to know why before he can write a word about it.
“If I’m writing my narrative and I go, what was that expense in office expense, I drill down and I can see the vendor information,” Bill said. “I’m like, oh yeah, I remember what that was.”
The detail he needs to explain a number sits one click behind it. On Dynamics GP, Bill had leaned on a separate imaging product to see that kind of backup. Now the path from the summary line to the vendor is inside the same Excel report he is already working in, which for a team of one is the difference between finishing the narrative and stalling on it.
When the CFO can find the answer himself
At Forum Communications, the same problem used to sit one level up. Kyle came into an organization running close to 20 separate databases in Dynamics GP, where getting consolidated financials was, in his words, a heck of a time. Forum now runs two ERP systems, Business Central and an EFI product called Monarch, feeding one set of reports.
What changed was who could get to the detail. Kyle’s CFO no longer waits for anyone to assemble it.
“He’ll get nostalgic and say, remember how hard it was to get financials before,” Kyle said. “Now I can just update it, drill down, and drill into two separate systems.”
Kyle pointed out how unusual that is. A CFO does not normally sit inside the ERP pulling detail, and in a larger organization would route that request through controllers and wait for it to come back. At Forum the CFO reaches the transaction himself, across two systems, without that round trip. The finance team stops being the stop on the way to an answer. The same structure carries Forum’s budgeting across dozens of entities, which we cover in how two finance teams eliminated spreadsheet chaos at scale.
The reports finance used to fight
Both leaders had lived with the older way of working, and both described the same drag.
For Kyle, it was Management Reporter. He remembered how poor those reports were and the effort it took to rebuild them when something needed to change. “You don’t have to fight to rebuild some of these old reports,” he said of the transition to Vivid. For Bill, Business Central’s native financial reporting, was simply unworkable for the package he sends to shareholders.
In both cases, the old process puts distance between a number and its explanation. Answering a straightforward question meant leaving the report, pulling data from somewhere else, and piecing it back together by hand, and that distance is what drill-down closes. When the detail is one or two clicks away inside the report, a variance that used to take hours to run down gets understood in the moment.
What that frees the team to do
When the path from a summary figure to the transaction behind it is immediate, the shape of the workday changes. Less of it goes to locating data, reconciling differences, and verifying figures. More of it goes to reading what the numbers say and explaining it to the people who rely on the finance team.
For Bill, that means the monthly narrative gets written without the process grinding to a halt on a single unfamiliar line. For Kyle and his CFO, it means the person asking the question is often the person who answers it, which takes a recurring set of requests off the finance team’s plate. In both cases, the work that used to take hours takes minutes, and the finance function spends its time on judgment rather than assembly.
Where the time comes back
If explaining results feels slower than it should, the cause is usually the number of steps it takes to reach the detail behind a number. One question tends to expose the gap. How many steps does it take to explain a figure? If the answer means leaving the report, exporting data, or rebuilding something, the workflow has room to get simpler.
Vivid brings drill-down directly into Excel-based reporting, so finance teams reach the transaction behind a number inside the reports they already use. It is part of what creating automated reports in Excel looks like in practice, where the detail behind a figure is always one step away. For Bill and Kyle, that is what turned reporting from a monthly search for answers into a monthly review of them, and it is where the time comes back to the finance team.
