The Directors' View - with Contribution Streaming is an innovative presentation of key management financial data because it reflects the concept of Contribution Streaming, the foundation of contributions analysis.

Contribution Streaming reflects two basic insights: that successful businesses commonly have no more than six contribution streams and that selling margins differ widely between them.  Commonly, margins as measured by material cost of sales percentages provide the primary basis for the identification of contribution streams, cost structure the secondary basis.

Legacy cost accounting approaches have two fundamental limitations:
unreliable allocations of materials (usually the biggest outlay of a business) to products and inability to allocate relevant overheads.  They are commonly complicated, slow, expensive and opaque.

The Directors' View - with Contribution Streaming takes its control values directly from the core financial record of the business: the trial balance in the general ledger.  It therefore operates an allocative systems architecture (self-correcting), as opposed to the summative architecture of traditional cost accounting (divergent).  Its presentation reveals all source data and how they have been treated.

Traditional profit and loss presentations conceal cross-subsidisation. They therefore give management no clear indication of where action should be focused.

Focused financial information empowers management action.  We have seen clients increase profitability six-fold as the Directors' View - with Contribution Streaming highlighted which contribution streams to focus on, which to pay less attention to.

The Directors' View - with Contribution Streaming software includes a suite of alternative materials allocations applications.  Payroll expense is allocated on the basis of position-by-position activity analysis.  Overheard allocation is item-by-item.

The suite of materials allocation applications ranges from basic (when
the source data set is limited) to highly accurate regression analysis 
(total of allocated materials mathematically controlled to within three percent of the control value, accuracy an order of magnitude better than legacy cost accounting systems).  The position-by-position approach makes payroll analysis accurate, simple and flexible.  Similarly, the item-by-item approach to overheads.

Above the core Profit and Loss Analysis - with Contribution Streaming, there is a summary of key time-based data, contextualising by displaying the impact of seasonality and facilitating break-even analysis.  Below it, every general ledger account is listed and payroll expense is listed position-by-position, setting information in a hierarchy, with no detail lost and enabling higher level analysis to be tied back directly back to fine-point detail.

One size does not fit all; commonly profit and loss information needs to be considered in light of balance sheet and cash flow implications.  Set-up of the Directors' View - with Contribution Streaming includes identification of such issues and provision of the necessary information.

The accuracy that comes from the application of regression analysis 
means that it becomes practicable to define contribution streams on
on alternative bases - matrix analysis.  For example, by product type vs 
vs by sales territory.

It also provides the foundation for price-change analysis and the precise
measurement of the impact of change in the terms of trade.

The Directors' View - with Contribution Streaming  is generated by Excel software interfacing directly with existing general ledger systems.  It complements those systems but does not interfere with them.

Set-up, including necessary customisation, typically takes some two to four person day.  On-going maintenance by trained staff typically takes half a day per month.