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Driving Performance for Private Equity Firms 5 Ad hoc Reporting is Failing to Fill the Gap Real-time reporting has evolved to fill in the gaps created by these time lags and supplement the content of standard financial reports with operational data. Ad hoc reporting o en follows a process as depicted and described in Figure 2� Figure 2: Process for Developing an Ad hoc Report 4 1 2 3 Analysis requested Information gathered/ extracted Data compiled for analysis Ad hoc report created This sort of approach gives rise to a number of issues that erode the overall effectiveness of ad hoc reporting, including: • Lacking in timeliness – This sort of process necessitates hand offs between a user, finance, and IT. This takes time and the final analysis may be ready several days or weeks a er the initial request is made. O en the urgency of the decision passes or the decision gets made in the absence of evidential analysis� • Lacking in consistency – The questions asked o en come up again and again. The ad hoc analysis must be repeated and updated with each passing period� This activity consumes the resources of those people working in finance and IT. • Lacking in control – As data is plucked from various systems and brought together in a spreadsheet, the connection to the underlying data is o en broken. One slippery finger or a change to the underlying data can invalidate the analysis� This necessitates additional manual reconciliation controls to ensure the ad hoc analysis remains valid� Many times this step may get neglected altogether giving rise to credibility issues between different sources of information.