30+ accounting reports on demand for GMM Grammy

Every period, the accounting team needs trial balances, balance sheets, profit and loss, notes and cost reports for each company, plus consolidated figures for the group after inter-company items are eliminated. Producing them from SAP BW involved manual steps, which made them slow and open to error.

GMM wanted its own reporting system: each report defined once and run for any company and period, interactive where the team analyses the numbers, in the exact layout where it files them, and with each person seeing only the companies and menus they are allowed to.

We started with the database design and a program specification, working through the logic of each report with the accounting team. The new data structure is organised around the dimensions accountants already use: GL code, profit centre, cost centre, company and trading partner.

Accounting data is imported from GMM’s GL warehouse on a schedule. ETL jobs load it into a datamart, and a stored procedure shapes the data for each report, so the website only asks for a report and shows it. Fixed-layout reports keep the formats the team files, such as the balance sheet and notes; the rest are interactive tables built with the MERCIL Design System.

The plan ran sixteen weeks, from May to August 2024, with an update to GMM at least every two weeks, UAT with real users, a user manual and training. Staff sign in with their existing GMM Click account.

Reports

• For each company: trial balance by account and by FS group, assets, liabilities, profit and loss, P&L by business, related-party balance sheet and P&L with cross-checks, selling and administrative expenses and costs year to date, and the notes for cash, inventory and cash flow
• For the group, after eliminating inter-company items: other income, interest expense, revenue by business, revenue analysis for the music, film and other businesses, costs by group code, and consolidated cross-checks
• For the executive committee: GL by profit centre and by cost centre
• Drill down from any line by profit centre, cost centre or trading partner, two levels deep in the trial balance
• Sort, filter, group and aggregate in every interactive report, and export any report to Excel or CSV

Master data and access

• GL codes and their groups, cost and profit centres with their business groups, companies and trading partners, maintained by the team
• Company charts with effective dates, so a report for a past period uses the group structure in force at the time
• Codes that appear in imported transactions but not yet in the master data are added automatically, so no transaction drops out of a report
• Admin, sub-admin and user roles, with menu permissions and data permissions by company