Financial reporting for heavy equipment dealerships

Originally published January 29, 2020. Updated February 21, 2024
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Your heavy equipment company's financial reporting isn't easy, but it is incredibly important for your business.  The ongoing manual data entry, paper reports, and month-end activities are time-consuming, prone to human error, and mind-numbing.

When TARGIT brought ACI into the global TARGIT family, we were particularly excited about making ACI’s signature service, Automated Financial Reporting (AFR), a part of TARGIT’s offering to our current and prospective customers.

 

What is AFR?

 

AFR is a financial reporting package designed to organize the entire breadth of a company’s financial data into a simple, easy-to-manage financial cube. AFR provides financial statement formats for Income Statements and Balance Sheets.
 
Companies have access to a single source from which to accurately analyze and compare multiple locations, divisions, departments, cost centers, product lines, customers, salespeople, vendors, and more. Today, over 60 percent of North American CAT Dealerships already use AFR for multi-dimensional financial analysis. 
 
AFR’s readily sorted and filtered reports make it easier to analyze company sales and expenses. They replace static operating statements and balance sheets with faster multi-dimensional financial reporting. Best of all, AFR is user-friendly enough for casual users who just need to review a report without accessing any financial systems and powerful enough for advanced users who need ad-hoc reporting capabilities and multi-dimensional drill-down.
 
 

ALSO READ: "What is Business Intelligence for Heavy Equipment?" our online guide that explores how dealers use BI to make informed decisions, increase efficiency, and drive their businesses forward. 

 

 

Top 10 reasons to go with AFR for your dealership

 

1. Customized report structure

You can structure reports according to your organization’s needs. For example, sort and filter by entities such as accounts, stores, departments, and more. These can include predefined relative date groups for convenient reporting, such as YTD, MTD, and Rolling 12.

They can also include actual and budget amounts as well as other custom measures based on customers' needs, such as employee headcount, financial ratios, prior year, prior month, and so on.

2. Automatic financial statements

Automatically provide up-to-date financial statements to operations and financial personnel. There are no manual or extra steps required by accounting to provide statements that are automatically updated daily. Data access can be limited based on user roles for added security and governance.

3. Easy drilling

AFR makes it possible to quickly drill from summary levels down to specific entities, such as Accounts, Departments, Stores, Divisions, etc., and even drill down to general ledger document details. When tracking down a problem, you can drill to see document-level detail about vendors and customers. This means that your analysis just got a lot easier.

4. One solution, every user

AFR provides a single solution that can accommodate both casual users who just need to open and review a defined report to advanced users who need to do more ad-hoc research.

5. Single tool

Perform most financial analyses from one tool in a timely fashion.

6. Completely automated data retrieval and presentation

Without AFR, retrieval and presentation of data must be compiled manually.

7. Ease IT burden

Users get the information they need without access to the financial system, and they no longer burden IT staff for queries against the transaction system.

8. Easier access to data

AFR provides data that has traditionally not been available because of difficulty in identifying data relationships and disparate sources.

9. Seamless general ledger migration

AFR has helped many dealers migrate from one general ledger to another. The migration is seamless to end-users despite significant changes to underlying processes and source data. Cubes, reports, and functionality remain the same, which minimizes any additional training costs.

10. Powerful dashboards

AFR’s modern dashboards allow executives and managers to view and track KPIs and get instant access to financial and operational metrics and company performance overall with just one click.

One tool for every financial reporting need

 

This is fast and reliable financial reporting. With AFR, there is no more need for paper reports. Imagine your month-end reporting without headaches. Automated reports also reduce time and error from manually entering in information to another system or to an Excel spreadsheet.
 
Viewing AFR in TARGIT, you can access your AFR dashboards any time, from anywhere with Mobile BI. The entire system can also be run from any web-based platform or desktop. That means you have instant access to your most important financial data, no matter what.

Want to see it in action?

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Originally published December 13, 2018. Updated February 21, 2024