Financial reporting: companies still lack key reporting data.

Despite all the attention paid to speeding up and improving the quality of financial reporting, most companies still say they have problems. In a study of more than 200 companies by Ventana Research:

* 80 percent of respondents indicated they were missing some critical information from periodic reports.

* Basic data that firms have traditionally collected is abundant, yet leading indicators about their company's or business unit's future performance was unavailable to more than half of the respondents.

* 57 percent of companies take more than five days to close the books; 73 percent believe it should be four days or less.

* Spreadsheets are a root cause of longer closing cycles. Fewer than 10 percent of companies have eliminated their reliance on spreadsheets, which frequently supplement the consolidation and reporting process for core activities like calculation of accruals or translation of currencies.

* About half of the companies that limited spreadsheet use were able to close in four days or less, compared to only 27 percent that used them extensively. Ventana Research estimates that limiting spreadsheet use enables a 20 percent faster closing time.