Adjustments for Scaled Financials - Best Practice

[JZamorski]

Hi Everyone,

In building out our financial reporting, I was seeking to get some opinions on best practice related to adjustments for financial statements when scaled and rounded to millions. We are coming from doing our consolidations and external reporting in Excel and reconciling to the external financials is always a challenge when pulling numbers out of our prior tool (TM1) as the quarterly adjustments never then add up to the full year adjustment.

We've been told that there are OneStream implementations where they have rounding done through business rules and account text fields. But have also been told that really the best practice is just to do rounding numbers in our filing tool, versus in OneStream. 

As users and technical experts, what are the opinions on what the best practice really is for this stuff?

Thanks! 

[EricOsmanski]

As a best practice, rounding should not be done as stored values within the database. 

Since every external report is required to foot, that could mean dozens, hundreds, thousands of members that hold data that is not of any real financial value. It requires rules to figure differences, they are not easy, and these rules impact performance. Additionally, the maintenance of applications that have this are cumbersome.

Another reason not to do this - think how this could make updating structures in OneStream when you have to consider how that impacts your rounding rules. You have taken away one of the real benefits of OneStream, being able to update your structures and made it a risk.

Reports are just a better place to handle this. They are better because you can determine what line to plug the rounding amount, and make reports that are easier to foot across and down.

[RyanDiehl]

Hey Eric, when you say that "reports are a better place to handle this" what exactly are you proposing? Is there a way to do a series of getdatacells on the reports themselves to make this work? 

Appreciate the help!

[ChristianW]

Some people might not like it, but in my opinion, it is the best, the most correct and the most honest solution to add an asterisk to the report, and just clarify, that all differences are due to rounding issues.

[LeeB]

This isn't always an option, particularly for external reporting, statutory accounts etc.

[ChristianW]

Yes, I know. Sad, but true. People prefere a purposely incorrect answer to the truth.