Data visualization in financial reports

• Autor(a) principal: Gameiro, Manuel Maria Gonçalves Matos
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.26/44323
• topic: Data Visualization; Financial Reports; Infographics; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

In the world of accounting and management, the use of visualization formats to display data on financial and corporate reports has been increasing in the last decade, now fostered by the digitalization in the financial industry and more specifically in accounting, as visualization formats aid in communicating financial information. (Schwabish, 2021). Companies are pursuing more and more the use of visualization formats, such as graphics rather than tables, to communicate the financial information, because readers tend to lower their mental workload when visualizing the data through visual formats since these visual formats allow them to transfer the cognitive processing to perceptual operations, therefore, increasing the comprehension and absorption capacity (Kleinmuntz & Schkade, 1993). This trend parallels the digital revolution across the various sectors of business and society at large. Company dashboards for large and listed firms are common these days (Tableau, 2021) and the present report intends to show how accounting outputs can be put in a more appealing way also for small and medium size companies as the ones that are clients of Check Office where the internship took place. This internship report presents the curricular and professional training activities at Check Office, an accounting services firm for small businesses, and the activities carried out in the different Departments of the company, namely in Accounting, in Human Resources, in Marketing and in Project Management. The present report focusses on data visualization for accounting data, deploying a comparison on the use of various types of visual formats (graphics) in financial and corporate reports with the methods used by Check Office. The literature review details the use of different types of visualization formats in financial and corporate reports, their impact on readers, the effect of illusions caused by the poor quality of graphics and the main components in the construction of a graph. This report also builds on three semi-structure interviews of the heads of Check Office’s departments, to consubstantiate the practices of the company and compare them to what the literature recommends. These interviews were conducted with Check Office´s CEO, Ms. Lurdes Santos, Check Office´s Accountant Director, Ms. Tânia Nascimento and Check Office´s Marketing Director, Mr. Pedro Duarte. The present report also features the tasks and activities carried out during the curricular and professional internship at Check Office and comes up with a number of suggestions for improvement. The improvement suggestions are focused on the adoption of infographics to financial and corporate reports in order to give the customer a better understanding of their company's evolution, as well as to clearly and concisely demonstrate the company's behaviour over the periods in the different maps used. Another improvement suggestion for Check Office would be the dissemination of the adoption of the digital accounting service, in order to address some important topics, such as data sharing, in order to provide a more personalized service to its clients, data quality, reducing the possibility of human error and data presentation, displaying the infographics alongside the financial reports, making them available in-time through the portal. All these advantages of the new digital accounting service can contribute to a better customer satisfaction and customer attraction, as agreed by the head of the marketing department of Check Office.