Hello. We are planning to start tool evaluations for automated financial consolidation, planning, budgeting, and forecasting tools soon. I have built a wish list for these tools that I plan on translating into requirements and an evaluation matrix. Does anyone have suggestions for me to add for the business objectives for these processes / requirements of the tools? You'll see I did get technical in some places, as I know some of these items help to really differentiate between tools. We are an SAP shop, so that's a constraint. Thanks in advance.
OVERALL OBJECTIVES
- Increase accuracy of reporting, plans, budgets, and forecasts o Improve process cycle time by:
- Creating custom workflows for financial processes
- Providing graphical tracking of progress
- Issue e-mail alerts to stakeholders throughout the process, reducing the overall consolidation cycle time and providing more accountability, ownership and control.
- Provide low total cost of ownership through:
- Maintenance of a single set of hierarchies and business rules
- Single point of maintenance and elimination of multiple redundant systems and data
- Usage of a single version/source of actual, budget and forecast data; eliminate or reduce data reconciliation efforts
- Drag and drop simplicity when handling reorganizations, acquisitions, spin-offs, and other structure changes
- Out of the box budgeting and reporting templates
- Robust integration with SAP source data
- Perform work through intuitive user interfaces that increase productivity by:
- Maximize work that can be done by non IT personnel to improve data accuracy, eliminate unnecessary handoffs, and maximize the turnaround time of business rule changes
- Improve data integrity and security
- Link to SAP and non-SAP systems for source data
- Model complex transformation rules for source data loads; use validation rules to provide exception reporting on source data
FINANCIAL CONSOLIDATION AND REPORTING OBJECTIVES
- Increase compliance with
accounting and regulatory standards - Close the books faster through automated loading, consolidation, and validation of data from multiple organizational units
- Provide multiple consolidation hierarchies for
management and statutory reporting requirements - Provide journal entry capabilities, to adjust data for consolidation issues, regulatory reporting, and management requirements
- Perform foreign currency and exchange rate variance analysis for global organizations; compare foreign currencies, while isolating the impact of rate variances.
- Maintain a detailed audit trail of all transactions, including adjustments offering auditable proof of data accuracy
- Generate reports on validations, inter-company eliminations and foreign currency translation
- Automate intra-fund and inter-fund allocations and eliminations
- Enable finance staff to focus on analysis and managing exceptions, rather than on reconciliations o Facilitate issue resolution in the Interfund allocation process
- Automate budget or forecast to actuals reporting
- Facilitate in-depth variance analysis and reporting
- Store text annotation of variances within the system
- Create financial and management reports, including exception reports through an easy-to-use interface, create income statements, balance sheets, shareholder equity statements, cash flow statements, and dashboards of key performance metrics
PLANNING, BUDGETING, AND FORECASTING OBJECTIVES
- Align spending with strategic goals o Make better decisions based on real time, on demand what-if analysis
- Perform complex what-if analysis using robust business rules that fully reflect business opportunities; tool does not dictate what can be modeled (e.g., no unnecessary limits on dimensionality, hierarchies, etc.)
- Enable multi-year scenario planning with what-if analysis
- Model from top down or bottom up on the same hierarchy; enable top down allocation of high level modeling data into lower levels of the hierarchy using business rules
- Enable custom, complex data entry and reporting forms that execute any business rule
- Provide rapid recalculation times for business rules; work while recalculations are taking place
- Link scenario planning to budget/financial targets
- Track versions and changes to plans, budgets, and forecasts
- Increase collaboration for improved accountability and planning accuracy
- Allow for on the fly calculations outside of the system when the system is offline that can be uploaded back into the system once it is offline again