Finance departments worldwide face increased & continuous pressure to deliver efficient and accurate financial and regulatory reports as well as growing demands to support the appropriate systems and processes to drive better performance of the business. Many departments are challenged by a lengthy, or inefficient, close process with multiple manual steps and checkpoints. For these departments, collecting and verifying data is challenging, as is processing consolidations such as minority interest, currency, and multiple regulatory reports. Financial statements are often delivered 'just in time', with little time available for analysis or review. Increasing focus on accountability, transparency and corporate governance, along with demanding, rapidly changing reporting requirements have made robust, cost-effective financial management more vital than ever.

IBM Cognos Finance Performance Manager is designed to help finance departments renew and improve the close, consolidate and report process through industry best-practices. It is a finance-owned solution with out of the box functionality that enables users to deploy and effectively manage the financial consolidation process. The solution provides the finance function with unmatched capabilities for managing the consolidation and reporting process. This is a web based, menu-driven application that is owned and managed by Finance providing the ability to consolidate diverse ledgers representing thousands of operating units and accounts into a common chart-of-accounts structure without the need for coding or scripting. It speeds up the close cycle time and gives businesses transparency for Sarbanes-Oxley and IFRS compliance. It supports local, regional, or global requirements, being able to adapt to business and regulatory changes in real time. IBM Cognos Finance Performance Manager enables businesses to spend more time analysing the data and on decision support and less time collecting the data and running the consolidation.

Why CSI?

CSI understand the challenges facing the Group Finance function. This is where our experience and knowledge adds value. We focus on financial reporting and statutory consolidation which means improvement of processes, helping businesses measure results and managing financial performance. CSI assist businesses with services and support around their software applications as well as offering resource consultancy. Our offering expands to include consulting also on strategic financial planning and business intelligence through the Group Finance function.

Benefits:

• Automation of the entire close process, from data collection through consolidation of financial and non financial data to output.
• Cycle times are reduced while data security and integrity is increased
• Greater visibility allows for better strategic decision making across the organisation, while easing the external reporting and compliance
• Allows the leverage of current IT investments. As a centralised system it meets the demand for secure and reliable data. In combination with enterprise planning and business intelligence it offers complete performance management