Financial Performance Analytics
Adaptable, packaged solution to accelerate decision making and improve financial performance
Quick, accurate answers to financial performance questions can be hard to come by — particularly in business environments characterised by multiple sources of financial information, including budgets and forecasts, in addition to core ERP systems.
IBM Cognos 8 Financial Performance Analytics is an integrated analytic application that enables your finance department to pull data from diverse databases using packaged, user-configurable reporting tools. It provides a real-time, in-depth view of your data and enables your finance team — from controllers to credit managers — to make faster decisions and respond quickly to new opportunities, empowering individual business areas to align and improve financial performance.
IBM Cognos 8 Financial Performance Analytics (FPA) is an integrated-yet-modular solution consisting of general ledger accounts payable and accounts receivable analytics. Helping you to quickly answer key business questions regarding the financial performance of your organisation, FPA pulls together data from best-of-breed ERP systems such as J.D. Edwards, Oracle E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft and non-ERP sources into standard reports so that your organisation can analyse, access and make decisions faster.
Accelerate Business Intelligence
IBM Cognos 8 FPA adds instant business value to your existing IT assets. It’s a configurable application that snaps into your existing technology environment, simplifying the delivery of relevant, reliable financial metrics.
FPA allows you to leverage transactional data housed in ERP and other systems, transforming operational data from disparate financial systems into actionable information to support faster, more informed decision making.
Best of all, FPA requires no programming. Users define and create their own reports through an easy-to-use interface, freeing IT to focus on delivering value to the broader organisation.
This adaptive approach takes into account the unique way your organisation operates, enabling the automatic modification or addition of new information from your ERP source, or from non-ERP sources.
General Ledger: Profitability Ratio Trending
It can also create new metrics needed to reflect sudden business changes, enabling Finance to easily add dimensions, subject areas and fact tables for use with ERP and non-ERP data sources.
What does this mean for end users? It means that what once took five people to modify a report--from the source designer, ETL developer, warehouse developer, business intelligence (BI) modeller and author — now only take three professionals. And it means rather than the lengthy development of requirements documents to support these changes, as well as the cost associated with making them, power users can collaborate and make them over the phone.
Get the answers you need – fast
IBM Cognos 8 Financial Performance Analytics consists of separate modules for General Ledger, Receivables and Payable Analytics.
IBM Cognos 8 General Ledger Analytics
Critical answers to questions on revenue generation, cash flow and assets enable you to identify business problems and opportunities, and drive better performance. FPA General Ledger Analytics let you analyse and report on:
- Financial performance reporting and analysis: Monitors, manages and communicates financial performance by creating income statements and balance sheets and analysing cash flow.
- Budget analysis: Helps business units and functions stay on budget and on plan for projected revenues and expenses.
- Key financial ratio reporting and analysis: Analyses current and past financial performance, comparing financial ratios such as leverage, liquidity and profitability/effectiveness.
- Operational performance analysis: Compares performance for legal and management entities such as subsidiaries and profit-and-loss centres. It reduces quarterly close processes with detailed transactional information including trial balances, income statements, cash flow analysis and ratio comparisons, to name a few.
IBM Cognos 8 Receivables Analytics
Using the FPA Receivable Analytics module, you can ensure that the accounts receivable function contributes to improving overall corporate performance:
- Accounts receivable performance analysis: Checks that payments are received when bills are due, and addresses any changes by monitoring the status of receivables.
- Customer credit analysis: Tracks customer payment patters, the cost to serve them, and the rick of non-payment to support more efficient customer relationship management, credit analysis and risk management.
- Accounts receivable corporate self-appraisal analysis: Enhances customer satisfaction by detecting ongoing adjusted payments, helping to improve loyalty and reduce process costs.
- Accounts receivable cash flow analysis: Forecasts cash inflow on the basis of existing credit items, and related terms of payment to provide a real-time picture of available cash to cover business expenses.
- Accounts receivable organisational effectiveness analysis: Measures and improves efficiency by reducing cash operating cycle time.
General Ledger: Balance Sheet Year Over Year
IBM Cognos 8 Payable Analytics
The FPA Payables Analytics module helps you identify, investigate and profile key data, providing critical answers for:
- Accounts payable performance analysis: Informs you of due dates and deviations for vendor payments, and reports on the ongoing status of payables.
- Accounts payable vendor account analysis: Reports vendor payment history to the supplier, enhancing cash flow forecasting and vendor relationship management.
- Accounts payable cash outflow analysis: Forecasts cash outflow information based on existing invoices, related terms of payment and discount trends.
- Accounts payable organisational effectiveness analysis: Assesses resource performance to determine the most efficient use of cash available to pay the most important bills first.
Better analytics, accelerated decisions
With IBM Cognos 8 Financial Performance Analytics, organisations have a single platform from which to source data using a packaged and adaptable solution. Fast-growing, decentralised organisations can pull data from different sources quickly, to accelerate decision making and drive performance.
Whether it’s senior management, a line-of-business manager or accounts payable, Cognos provides the tools you need to gain a competitive edge.
Contact SMS today for a demonstration of IBM Cognos 8 Financial Performance Analytics, or for a consultation to understand how SMS can help you solve any Information and Performance Management challenge you face.