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Financial reporting as 'single version of the target'

Tim Atkins - Senior Consultant and Lead Architect for Financial Planning & Consolidations at ConVista

By Tim Atkins
Cape Town, 30 Jul 2015
Tim Atkins - Senior Consultant and Lead Architect for Financial Planning & Consolidations at ConVista.
Tim Atkins - Senior Consultant and Lead Architect for Financial Planning & Consolidations at ConVista.

No, the title is not miss-typed. "Single version of the truth" has been bandied about business as long as there has been a concept of a management information system from the turn of the century. However, while this concept addresses myriad spreadsheets reporting actual data into one data warehouse and reporting model, the budget process is often left following an archaic, old process - even if it's dressed up in a new tool.

Traditionally, budgeting has been the responsibility of the finance and accounting teams in the organisation. Granted, they usually require input from the business in the process, but in the end, everyone ends up being held to a high level budget that they do not necessarily agree with.

Budgets are generally completed at organisational unit level for certain high level accounts. While this sufficed in providing shareholders and finance teams with a degree of comfort that actuals are being tracked against a target, it doesn't empower the business at the ground level to make better decisions and drive out targets, says Tim Atkins - Senior Consultant and Lead Architect for Financial Planning & Consolidations at ConVista.

The current selection of EPM tools on the market have enabled business to move from a world of massive spreadsheets and "network drive" hell, to a process whereby these entry points are all automated and the collecting of data is somewhat effortless. However, as painless as the process may seem, there is still often a disconnection between the budget and what business units are planning to do at the lowest level.

With the power of predictive analytics and in-memory databases, it is possible to marry the two worlds in driving a marketing plan; using predictive analytics to positively impact strategic growth at company level.

The outcome being that a company will have a high level budget to satisfy shareholders and financial managers; however, it will be the product of planning at the lowest level - enabling the business to drive strategies to attain the planned budgets.

There is a real opportunity for the business not only to be reporting a single version of the truth, but for every division to report based on that version and to be aiming for a single version of the target.

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Editorial contacts

Jacki Thorburn
ConVista Consulting
(+27) 21 551 9294
Jacki.Thorburn@ConVista.com