Flexible Financial Reporting and Analysis

One of the most imposing hurdles to successful corporate management is the inaccessibility of up-to-date information by those who need it fast to make important business decisions. Decision-makers require current information in order to understand how they are measuring against plan, which products or regions are most profitable, and how best to lead the business.

Through a combination of near real-time financial and nonfinancial reporting, and robust, powerful, ad hoc analysis, our Extended Analytics solution gives you secure access to the wealth of trusted information. Your nontechnical users will find it easy to use while your office of finance will find it easy to maintain.

Greater Insight and Understanding

With market-facing analysis and the capability of combining data from different applications that encompass financial and nonfinancial information, your business users obtain a broader, more holistic view of your company's current performance.

Secure Access to the IDM
Extended Analytics fully integrates with our single integrated data model (IDM), which means that data from a range of financial performance management applications is easily combined into a single reporting application. This integration guarantees data reliability and reinforces a single version of the truth, while thorough audit trails provide full data lineage. With no manual processing required, you use a variety of drill-down and drill-through options to obtain more detailed information on consolidated data. Managing security through a single application avoids costly and time-intensive maintenance across multiple systems—and ensures your users see only the data that is relevant to them.

Combined Financial and Nonfinancial Reporting
Not limited to historical financial statements and metrics, our Extended Analytics solution encompasses forward-looking and nonfinancial indicators, allowing your business users to see a more balanced view of the business. Nonfinancial value-drivers—such as market share, customer loyalty, and quality of management—form the cornerstone for enhanced business reporting. These drivers not only enable monitoring of sustainable economic value today but also pave the way for future regulatory disclosure. Nonfinancial metrics expand to cover environmental and ethical issues for reporting, highlighting good business citizenship and compliance with corporate social responsibility standards.

Access Information Beyond EPM Applications
Extended Analytics enables your organization to make true apples-to-apples comparisons against rivals, potential partners, and acquisition targets by integrating internal and external performance metrics to facilitate peer-group benchmarking and merger-and-acquisition (M&A) planning. By centrally managing benchmarking data, your company gains a competitive edge when test-driving M&A and other competitive strategies. Extended Analytics can also access enterprise data sources beyond FPM applications, including legacy, customer relationship management (CRM), operational, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and data warehousing. This enables wider visibility to other key data necessary for performance reporting and analysis such as top customers and key human resource (HR) metrics.

Autonomy for Your Office of Finance

With Extended Analytics, your financial users can design data views, write reports, and perform analysis autonomously—leading to faster results and greater independence from IT. Financial intelligence ensures business insight is always reliable. Zero latency ensures your information is always up-to-date—which means your business analysis plays an integral role in the management process, directly contributing to reduced closing cycles.

Self-Service User-Oriented Environment
Designed by finance professionals for finance professionals, Extended Analytics provides autonomy for your office of finance, drastically reducing the need for support from IT. Finance users manage the complete process for themselves—all the way from designing data views, to authoring new reports, to performing advanced multidimensional analysis. Tasks are accomplished using metadata-aware tools, with an emphasis on ease-of-use—and no need for specialist IT knowledge.

Financial Intelligence
Extended Analytics understands financial information. Your users interact with and explore the information with the knowledge that the financial data they are exploring will always be presented in the way they expect. For example, balance sheet accounts are not added over time, while income statement accounts flow over time for quarter-to-date or year-to-date calculations. With built-in intelligence for currency calculation and intercompany eliminations already handled as part of the consolidation process, insight is more reliable. As organizational changes occur, Extended Analytics supports analysis and reporting on both a pro forma and as-reported basis. This allows your company to isolate, analyze, and report on the financial and business impacts of these organizational changes.

Zero Latency
Enterprise stakeholders require more analysis based on complex models and in shorter time periods. Extended Analytics delivers information to users in a near real-time basis, with information updates occurring automatically from the IDM. With faster closing cycles, Extended Analytics gives back what every finance department requires—more time. By providing immediate availability of performance management data during financial closing periods, organizations are able to perform more in-process analysis. With this information, your enterprise can respond more rapidly to business events and focus on profitable products and regions and better overall business planning.

Ease of Use for Business Users

With the ability to switch between production and ad hoc reporting at will, all kinds of business users can create and distribute reports quickly and easily from a single application. Full support for familiar productivity tools such as Microsoft Office makes manual intervention unnecessary—saving time and avoiding costly mistakes. Yet there is no compromise on analysis flexibility for advanced users.

Production Reporting and Ad Hoc Analysis From a Single Application
Production book reporting and ad hoc analysis are available from the same easy-to-use Extended Analytics application. This means that ad hoc analysis is easily transformed into a production report for wider distribution as part of the management blue book. Likewise, production reports also serve as the entry point for ad hoc analysis, allowing subsequent drill-down, slice and dice. Reports remain dynamic and adapt to changes in structure when subsequently refreshed, new reporting units are created, or product lines change. Interaction is rapid and logical, facilitating insightful ad hoc analysis at the speed of thought—and allowing your users to isolate specific organizational dynamics, trends, and events and to pinpoint the triggers and sources of significant activities.

Full Integration With Microsoft Office
Your business users perform reporting and ad hoc analysis from a familiar spreadsheet environment, allowing them to leverage all of Excel's formatting and graphing capabilities. You can embed any number of reports into a single PowerPoint presentation, combining them with narrative to present in management meetings or to the board. At the click of a button, you can refresh reports in place, saving time and avoiding costly mistakes common when copying-and-pasting between different tools. Since most business users are already familiar with Microsoft Office tools, any learning curve is minimized. It's easy to collaborate and distribute reports using both printed and electronic formats, including web portals.

User Experience Adapts to Individual Needs
Whether you're thoroughly familiar with the consolidation process or have little or no financial expertise, the interaction adapts to your individual needs. A corporate controller naturally expects to interact with "technical" consolidation dimensions, like Scope, Variant, and Audit ID. A financial analyst performing ad hoc analysis on the same consolidated data expects to be shielded from such complexity, but wants easy access to additional dimensions, such as business unit or product. An operations executive simply wants to see the latest numbers using the familiar standard production report layout. Powerful exceptions, dynamic filtering, ranking, and sorting are available to those who want them—no need to handcraft scripts, MDX, or SQL. Seasoned users already familiar with their data can create reports by typing accounts or products directly instead of selecting them from a report wizard—allowing new reports to be authored quickly and easily.