Financial Performance
Management
The need to evolve beyond spreadsheets for budgeting & financial reporting
More than 50% of enterprises are still using spreadsheets and still struggling with version
control issues, formula errors, broken links and limited security.
When finance teams spend too much time wrestling spreadsheets and collating information,
there’s little time to analyse the data for real business insights.
Let’s change the way your organisation handles
financial reporting and budgeting processes.
Move your organisation beyond a pure
accounting-based approach and budget in line
with key business drivers.
Financial Budgeting & Forecasting
Budgets are often outdated long before they’re finalised, which makes them frustrating to work with. Flip the budgeting process from being finance-centric and define an approach that involves all operational staff and reflects the way the business runs.
IBM Cognos Planning Analytics
- Provides a framework that allows for completely customised models that replicate and greatly enhance any budget calculations currently being performed in large Excel spreadsheets.
- Users can continue to work in spreadsheets, but all data is held on a secure central server that performs as a single source of information and business logic for all reports and templates.
Draw up functional, intelligent budgets with IBM Cognos Planning Analytics Solution
Payroll/HR
- Budget by employee, salary and other cost to the company components
- Automatically import data from the payroll system
- Apply an increase at a certain date for all staff, or categories
- Budget for new employees with unique business rules
- Budget smarter for employee-related costs like laptops, uniforms
- Reduce time spent budgeting, increase report accuracy
Sales
- Budget by customer, by products across areas, in local and group currencies
Travel
- Manage all travel costs and expenses centrally
New Assets
- Budget properly for property, plant and equipment investments
- Get accurate charges to income statement and balance sheet
What-if scenarios
- Flexibility to apply different business assumptions to your business plan
- Quickly and easily compare different versions without duplicating spreadsheets
- Budget by employee, salary and other cost to the company components
- Automatically import data from the payroll system
- Apply an increase at a certain date for all staff, or categories
- Budget for new employees with unique business rules
- Budget smarter for employee-related costs like laptops, uniforms
- Reduce time spent budgeting, increase report accuracy
Driver-based budgeting
- Simplify the process of driver-based budgeting
- Item can be driven by headcount, revenue or any other business activity
Rolling budget forecasts
- Use historical data to project future numbers in a flexible manner
- Update original budget using calculation logic and actual year-to-date values
Operational cash flow management, budgets and forecasts
- Accurate cash flow forecasting is critical in financial performance management
- Factor in all relevant drivers (debtors, VAT, income tax, current bank balances etc)
IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) Statutory Consolidation & Management Reporting
Long days and late nights spent finalising reports – monthly, quarterly, half-yearly, annually – for finance teams is finally a thing of the past.
No more stressing over passing last minute journal entries, cross-checking for accuracy, dealing with multiple currencies and inter-company eliminations.
IBM Cognos Controller (Consolidations)
- Finance-owned solution that can be operated and expanded internally without specialist skills
- All consolidation rules are configured in easy-to-use application interface
IBM Cognos Controller provides the tools to help your finance team develop and maintain a consistent reporting framework regardless of whether they’re using Excel or another ERP.
- Map trial balances in a once-off exercise and load them against common reporting chart of accounts
- Store and consolidate financial and non-financial data, including key ratios, employee numbers and segmental information
- Store every piece of information required for annual financial statement preparation and apply automatic consolidation rules
- Create control structures that meet different reporting requirements, e.g: monthly management or statutory reporting
Which other financial reporting tasks can
IBM Cognos Controller handle with ease?
Multi-currency financial reporting
- Streamline and automate processes, right down to Foreign Currency Translation Reserve (FCTR) values
- Make allowance for different rates for actual, budget, and forecast value, including experimenting with what-if scenarios at different rates
Automatic eliminations:
- Including automatic calculations for minority interest and equity accounting is easy and intuitive, regardless of whether on an inter-company transaction or on an acquisition transaction level
Multi-entity financial reporting:
- Remove single legal entity capability limitations in accounting/ERP systems
- Make it just as easy to report across entities as across cost centres
- Utilise the familiarity of Excel’s front-end as part of the report pack process
- Accommodate multiple entity hierarchies to provide different views on data, such as LE (Statutory view) or MG (Management view).
Multi-divisional/business area financial reporting:
- Deal with business structural changes easily without having to conduct a massive spreadsheet-based overhaul
Cost allocations/reallocations:
- Deal with expenses not directly related exclusively to any specific business area
- Re-allocate the costs on headcount, revenue, percentage split, or an industry-specific allocation methodology
- Apply complex rules securely and test different allocation methodologies during finalisation processes
Income statement/statement of comprehensive income:
- Substantial underlying logic makes it easy to group together cost centres and deliver the required chart of accounts
- Automate the processes behind producing the financial statements, present information in multiple ways to cover statutory and any other format required for management reporting
- Visualise the impact of business actions without the risk of cut-and-paste exercises and the difficulty of reconciling back to source systems
- Compile custom statements based on specific grouping of different cost centres across legal entities for a month, a quarter, a certain YTD period, or another scenario in local and/or group currencies
- Generate different statements on demand in minutes, not hours/days
Balance sheet/statement of financial position:
- Easily produce monthly consolidated balance sheets
- Enables a clear, realistic view of the financial position of your business
Cash flow statements:
- Benefit from reviewing the flow of cash over the reporting period on a month-to-month basis
Cost allocations/reallocations:
- Get a handle on industry-specific reporting and/or ratios as part of the management reporting process
Take back time and get down to analysing consolidated numbers and making better business decisions without the fear of reporting on incorrect or inaccurate data.
Narrative and External Financial Reporting
Compiling financial statements for external reporting is a compulsory statutory reporting function carried out by highly-skilled, costly resources in the finance team.
- Complete reports in less time, with greater accuracy through automation
- Skilled finance resources freed from time-consuming, repetitive tasks
- Reduce the stress and auditing costs associated with reporting periods
- Overcome growth pains as volume of data and regulatory demands increase
- Avoid multiple contributors passing files over unsecured channels
With automated processes, finance staff will have the time to analyse data and make
real strategic decisions vital for business growth.
Workiva is a FPM solution that eliminates the blood, sweat, and tears from business reporting processes.
- Extremely intuitive to use: Minimal training required on interface
- Reduce risk, cost, and data inaccuracies: One version of business truth
- Ensure process consistency: Automate manual copy-and-paste processes
- Enhance security and control: Compliance and governance is built in
- Deploy to all contributors: Reporting requirement-based licensing
- Streamline document review: Same document, different access levels
- Various output formats: generate high-value documents with XBRL tags.
