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Bectran Product Team
I
December 23, 2025
7 minutes to read
December in the finance department is rarely quiet. While sales teams rush to sign final contracts and operations teams push to ship final orders, the credit and collections team faces a different kind of pressure. You are not just managing risk. You are preparing to close the books.
The year-end close is the ultimate test of your data integrity. Every discrepancy, every unapplied payment, and every unresolved dispute must be accounted for. For many Credit Managers, this period is defined by late nights, massive spreadsheets, and a heavy reliance on reporting tools that seem to struggle exactly when you need them most.
Ideally, reporting should be a background process, a utility that provides answers when asked. In reality, for many organizations, reporting becomes a manual project in itself. When the volume of transactions peaks and the timeline for reconciliation shrinks, the limitations of legacy reporting workflows become obvious.
The challenges surrounding data access and reporting consistency are remarkably similar across organizations. The frustration often stems from a lack of speed, reliability, and simplicity.
During year-end, time is the scarcest resource. You cannot afford to wait for data. Yet many teams rely on reports that must be built, scheduled, or manually extracted by other departments.
When discussing the creation of essential financial reports, finance teams report that it takes days to produce them. When a report takes days to create, it is already obsolete by the time you receive it. In a fast-moving operational environment, cash postings, disputes, and credit limits change every hour. A three-day-old report is a historical record, not a tool for decision-making.
Speed is meaningless if the data is incorrect or the system fails to deliver. Many teams turn to automation to address speed issues, only to find the automation is inconsistent.
Reliability is binary. Either the report runs, or it doesn't. When systems behave unpredictably, teams lose trust and revert to manual checking. Credit leaders ask: What would cause reports not to auto-pull? They're getting sporadic reports that sometimes auto pull and sometimes they don't.
Sporadic reporting is dangerous during a close. If you cannot be certain that your automated aging report ran successfully, you have to verify it manually. This defeats the purpose of automation. Instead of saving time, the system adds a layer of paranoia and double-checking to the workflow.
Most ERPs and legacy systems rely on rigid job schedulers. You set a report to run every Monday at 8:00 AM. That works fine for standard weekly updates. But year-end is not standard. You might need that report on Tuesday at 4:00 PM, and then again on Wednesday morning.
Credit teams describe scenarios where the system logic can't handle the nuance between a standing order and a one-off request: it is fixed for a recurring job, but if you schedule it as one-time, it still runs on the recurring schedule.
This highlights a critical flaw in many reporting engines: they are built for routine, not for the dynamic, ad-hoc nature of a financial close. When you need a one-time pull to verify a specific ledger balance, the system often forces you into a complex scheduling workflow or fails to execute the ad hoc request correctly, reverting to the recurring schedule.
Software often forces users through multiple screens, parameter selections, and export dialogs just to see a document. Credit managers express a desire for radical simplicity: can we have one, just one button to download a PDF?
Complexity discourages use. If retrieving a credit application or payment history requires 10 clicks and a navigation menu, users will avoid doing so. One button represents the standard of usability that modern finance teams expect and require to move fast.
Why do enterprise systems, which process millions of dollars, struggle to generate a PDF or run a report on demand? The answer usually lies in the system's architecture and the processes built around it.
Many ERPs were designed in an era where batch processing was the standard. Transactions would queue up during the day and post overnight. Reporting was a retrospective activity focused on yesterday's activities.
Modern O2C management is real-time. You need to know cash positions now. However, the underlying data structure often requires a refresh or a cube rebuild before reports can update. This architectural lag causes delays: reports take days to generate or fail to reflect the last hour of work.
In many organizations, the Credit Manager does not own the report logic. The IT or Database team does. If you need a column added to your aging report (e.g., "Last Interaction Date"), you must submit a ticket.
At year-end, IT queues are full. The rigidity often stems from hard-coded schedules that business users cannot modify. The system is "fixed for a recurring job" because changing it requires technical intervention that isn't available on short notice.
Reporting reliability issues (the sporadic auto-pulls) often point to integration failures. Your data likely resides in three places: the ERP, a bolt-on collections tool, and a credit-scoring provider.
To generate a single comprehensive report, the system must query all three. If one connection times out (perhaps due to heavy year-end traffic), the entire report fails or returns incomplete data. This fragility creates inconsistencies that force teams to revert to manual verification.
The "one button" request highlights a design failure. Legacy systems prioritize data density over usability. They assume the user is a database administrator who wants to configure every query parameter. In reality, the user is a Credit Manager seeking an answer. When software focuses on the query process rather than the outcome (the PDF), it creates unnecessary friction.
To address these frustrations, O2C leaders need to adopt new frameworks for their data strategy. This is about changing how your team interacts with data.
The goal is to remove the middleman from reporting. Finance teams should not rely on IT or other departments to generate standard operational reports.
The Shift: Move from "Request and Wait" to "Filter and Export."
This solves the "days to create" problem. The data should already be there. The reporting layer should simply be a window into live data, accessible to business users at any time.
You cannot review every account at year-end. You must focus on the anomalies.
The Shift: Move from "Review All" to "Review Exceptions."
Instead of printing a 500-page aging report, your reporting strategy should highlight:
This reduces the volume of data you need to process. If automation is sporadic, it is often due to a heavy data load. Querying only for exceptions reduces the load and increases reliability.
Adopting the user's "just one button" mindset is critical to efficiency. Every recurring task should be reduced to the fewest possible steps.
The Shift: Move from "Configure" to "Template."
If you run the same year-end reconciliation report every December, save the configuration as a template. The user should not have to select columns, define date ranges, or choose file formats every time. The system should remember recurring job settings while allowing immediate, one-click execution for one-time needs without breaking the logic.
There is a difference between the report you give to the CFO (Accounting Precision) and the report your team uses to collect cash (Operational Visibility).
The Shift: Separate the two streams.
Don't use the heavy, rigid ERP financial reports for daily collections work. Use operational dashboards that refresh frequently. This allows your team to work fast without waiting for the heavy "month-end close" processes to finish running in the ERP. This decoupling ensures that even if the main finance reports take days, your team is not flying blind.
Solving the reporting pain point directly impacts the company's financial health.
When reports are unreliable or sporadic, risk slips through the cracks. A customer might exceed their credit limit significantly during the holiday rush, but if the report didn't auto pull, you might not catch it until January. Reliable, automated reporting acts as an early warning system, preventing bad debt exposure before it becomes a write-off.
Auditors look for consistency. If your year-end close involves a dozen manual spreadsheets because the system reports were too slow, you are creating an audit trail nightmare. Automated, system-generated reports provide a clean, traceable record of exactly what the AR landscape looked like on December 31st.
The faster you can identify unapplied cash and open invoices, the faster you can resolve them. If it takes three days to generate a list of open invoices, that is three days where cash is sitting stagnant. Real-time reporting accelerates the entire cash cycle, helping you bring in those final payments before the year closes.
Year-end is stressful. If your team is fighting with software (struggling to download PDFs, waiting for reports, double-checking data), burnout increases. Giving them tools that work ("just one button") respects their time and allows them to focus on high-value work rather than data wrestling.
The goal for this year-end is to survive the close. The goal for next year is to automate it.
If you are currently facing the frustrations of slow, sporadic, or rigid reporting, use this time to document exactly where the process breaks. These notes will be the blueprint for your improvements.
Closing the books shouldn't require heroism. It requires reliable data and clear processes.
Tired of year-end reporting that takes days to create? Bectran's real-time dashboards give you one-click access to aging reports, exception lists, and portfolio analytics, eliminating delays and providing your team with reliable data when they need it most. See how automated reporting works.
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