Fixing the Reports is not Fixing the Problem

Johan Smith

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Often, we see highly educated FP&A professionals, with sharp Excel skills and impressive dashboards, struggling to make sense of their information.

Why? Because underneath all those visuals and formulas often lies a missing foundational skill: Accounting.

Not a high-level understanding of financial statements, but a working knowledge of accounting processes, debits and credits, transaction flows, and how numbers actually land in the system.

Educated ≠ Experienced

This is not a criticism of ambition or talent, far from it. Most FP&A professionals are smart, analytical, and eager to contribute strategically. Many hold advanced degrees and certifications.

But more and more, we see young finance professionals enter the field with limited exposure to how numbers are generated in the first place. They’ve spent more time learning how to model revenue growth scenarios than how to read a general ledger. More time learning data visualization tools than understanding journal entries.

So what happens? When something doesn’t reconcile or doesn’t “look right,” the instinct isn’t to investigate the accounting trail. It’s to work around it:

• Reallocate it manually
• Adjust it in Excel
• Add a line item to “correct” the variance
• Build a logic to filter out anomalies
• Copy-paste data into another version

And just like that, the spreadsheet grows. And so does the problem.

Fixed and Workarounds Don’t Solve Issues

The real danger here isn’t the extra work (though it certainly adds hours every month). It’s that these fixes become repetitive and eventually standard operating procedure.

Rather than fixing the issue at the source (misclassified accounts, wrongly coded transactions, poor chart of accounting classifications, inconsistent cost centers, duplicate entries etc), finance teams keep applying band-aids and duct tapes to their reporting. Over time, the team becomes less about analysis and more about clean-up.

That isn’t FP&A. That is post-processing, financial fire-fighting.

And eventually, no one remembers why certain formulas exist, where hardcoded values are, or which sheet has the “real” version. Or if any of it still ties back to the accounting systems. It’s like building a house on sand and keep patching the cracks instead of laying a solid foundation.

The Power of Understanding the Numbers

You don’t need to be a certified accountant to work in FP&A. But you do need to know:

• How a transaction flows from source to report
• The essentials of debits and credits
• Why journal entries matter
• How classifications affect reporting
• Where errors typically originate

That understanding is what allows you to spot issues early, test your numbers, challenge anomalies confidently, and build systems that are truly trustworthy.

It also empowers you to collaborate better with accounting, IT, and operations, because you’re speaking the same language.

And most importantly, it gives you the ability to say: “Wait a minute, we shouldn’t be fixing this in the report. We should fix it in the accounting.”

What Good FP&A Should Do

Good FP&A doesn’t just present data, it ensures data is reliable. That starts with understanding where data comes from, how it’s structured, and what levers can (and can’t) be pulled.

In the best finance teams:

• Reports are light on manual corrections
• Forecasts are grounded in reality
• Issues are traced to their source and resolved
• Collaboration with accounting is constant
• Systems are structured to prevent the same problem twice

That’s not just clean. It’s faster, more accurate, and much more valuable to the business.

Final Thought

You don’t fix your car dashboard when the engine light turns on. You lift the hood and call your garage.

FP&A should do the same. Don’t fix the symptom in the report, fix the root cause in the source data, in the process, or in the system design. And talk to your accounting team!

If you're spending more time fixing numbers than understanding them, maybe it’s time to get back to basics, and build forward from there.

At XLReporting, we help finance teams move away from patchwork models and toward structured systems where issues get fixed once, and not every month.

Would you like to explore how XLReporting can help you? Request a demo today! Click here

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The Top 5 Pitfalls in Budgeting
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More from Johan Smith:

The Top 5 Pitfalls in Budgeting
If You Break It, You Own It
When Control Becomes a Constraint
Fixing the Reports is not Fixing the Problem
Still taking over a week to close your books?

Back to the list