A Centralized Financial Reporting System for Improved Data Access and Analysis

Abstract

"Throughout the Department of the Navy, accurate and timely understanding of the command’s business financials is critical for decision making. The inability to directly connect data analytics applications to financial data sources and the availability of multiple sources for data results in large variability in the information reported and significant time to download and pre-process the data. The Naval Undersea Warfare Center, Keyport Division developed the Centralized Financial Reporting (CFR) system that allows analysts to access multiple datasets required for financial management. The cleaned and validated datasets are available via SharePoint and a Power BI Premium workspace. Ready-to-use files, dataflows, and semantic models stored in these workspaces allow for immediate visualization and data analysis, resulting in a significant time savings and an estimated cost savings of more than a million dollars on these tasks. Additionally, easy accessibility to transaction-level details allows a quick evaluation of the contributors to the financial health of Keyport business. In this paper, tThe CFR system is described and evaluated, including the three concerns it’s use mitigates: the significant resources required for financial reporting, difficulty evaluating factors affecting information garnered from the data, and discrepancies in reporting that are experienced with the current methods used to evaluate business financials."