Benefits of automating the financial reporting and performance management processes
- Details
- Category: Submitted recommendations
- Published: 12 May 2013
Solutions that automates financial reporting and budgeting can enable users to perform in-depth what-if analysis, speed up the process and simplify financial analytics. It can also increase regulatory compliance and reduce the amount of labor involved in generating reports. While financial reporting and analysis software of the past often required heavy IT support, experts say the latest systems are now being designed for nontechnical business users.
Automated financial reporting as well as performance management systems can be achieved either through your transactional systems or by setting up a specialized multi-tier architecture. Although niche dedicated components requires implementation time and may not integrate well with legacy systems, specialized products coupled with enhanced processes offer deeper and more customized functionality than standard reporting modules within an ERP.
Financial analytics is the creation of ad hoc analysis to answer specific business questions and forecast possible future financial scenarios. Financial analysis software can speed up the creation of reports and present the data in an executive dashboard, a graphical presentation that is easier to read and interpret than a series of spreadsheets with pivot tables.
Popular financial analysis software programs include:
Oracle Financial Analytics - modular component of Oracle’s integr ated family of business intelligence (BI) software applications. Enables insight into the general ledger, provides visibility into performance against budget and the way staffing costs and employee or supplier performance affects revenue and customer satisfaction.
SAP ERP Financial Analytics - help organizations define financial goals, develop business plans and monitor costs and revenue during execution.
SAS Business Analytics - provides an integrated environment for data mining, text mining, simulation and predictive modeling -- a mathematical model that predicts future outcomes – as well as descriptive modeling, a mathematical model that describes historical events and the relationships that created them.
IBM Cognos Finance - provides out of the box data analysis capabilities for sales, supply chain procurement and workforce management functions.
NetSuite - provides financial dashboards, reporting and analytic functions that allow personal key performance indicators (KPIs) to be monitored in real time.
