Each month at PKF Withers Tsang we take a look at the various applications and digital programs that are available and designed to help your business thrive.
This month it’s Spotlight Reporting
Spotlight Reporting is a Cloud Based Reporting application that integrates seamlessly with Xero, QuickBooks, MYOB, WorkflowMax, Excel and more.
Your data from any of these sources can be transformed in a way that becomes more useful to you by providing a more comprehensive overview of your business financials. Spotlight transforms your financial data into reports that are easily customizable and present the information in a clear, easy to understand format giving you a meaningful insight into your business.
This is all done through Spotlight’s three main tools which we have summarized below:
| Spotlight Reporting | Spotlight Forecasting | Spotlight Dashboard |
|---|---|---|
| Takes your Xero data and generates tailored reports, throughout the year for in-depth analysis. | Builds custom 3-way forecasts, enabling clear analysis and proactive decision making.
Creating “what-if” scenarios to assist in future planning and strategic actions. |
Creates a visual single-page snapshot of your key business metrics, giving you clear information to help easily track and monitor the performance against budgets or action plans. |
Key features and benefits:
Reporting
- Spotlight Reporting takes the high-level financial information from your business and condenses it into an easily understandable format, providing the key information you need as business owners. This gives you a useful tool for monitoring the business performance and allows you to reshape business strategies and plan for the future.
- Set, monitor and achieve goals with relevant and specific action plans to help you focus on the key areas to drive your business forward.
- Track and monitor non-financial business drivers for better outcomes.
- Filter results based on categories for departmental or divisional reports
- Provides a user-friendly interface to edit and customise each individual report page, where all your charts and tables are dynamically generated, providing a clean visual representation to work with.
- Offers pre-build templates for industry specific matrices and KPIs
Forecasting
- Import your existing budget from Xero or build directly in Spotlight with your historic data, by using dynamic rules and driver to forecast revenue and costs.
- Generates a forecasted Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow for up to 5 years.
- Not only will you be able to see your baseline forecast, you can also add up to 5 different “what-if” scenarios to the existing forecast to stress test best or worst case scenarios, or evaluate the impact of future plans.
- Cashflow forecasting helps you better understand your cash flow needs, plan for the future, scope projects, secure funding and make better business decisions. Spotlight Forecasting can help you look ahead with confidence.
- The P&L forecast enforces double entry accounting, and historical values are locked from editing. This ensures the accuracy and integrity of your cash values.
Dashboard
- Spotlight Dashboard provides an instant snapshot of business performance.
- Your financial information is displayed in a simple curated one-pager, with the key information that you need at a glance, condensed into easily understandable/digestible charts and graphs.
- Include non-financial business drivers to highlight important KPIs for a better understanding of business performance.
- Ability to give you a clear and simple overview highlighting key drivers of your business, easily track your performance against budget.
Our verdict:
The platform delivers strong budgeting and cashflow forecasting. It provides good visibility of business performance which can be the difference between a business thriving or barely surviving, critical especially as we continue to see the impacts of COVID-19 on business.
With Spotlight’s Forecasting and Reporting tools, we can transform your basic business data and budgets into powerful reporting that highlight the key insights needed for strategic planning, to help navigate challenges and look towards the growth of your business.
Even though Spotlight can be a powerful tool for your business, there is a learning curve to this application as with any new system. Using this application will require some time to learn how to use it properly, especially if you plan on using the application yourself. While there are a lot of automations to aid you in creating a report, there is still need for a manual process in setting up the rules of each account which you may find a bit complex in the beginning.
Another thing to note is while Spotlight Reporting does integrate with a wide range of data sources, one data source that it does not integrate with is Google Sheets.
If you want to get started with Spotlight Reporting or have any questions regarding this app then contact us here.