New TM1 Financial Consolidations Application addresses key aspects of financial planning, budgeting, forecasting, reporting, analysis

MCI Consultants, the leading distributor for Applix`s TM1 product in SA, today announced enhancements to the latter`s TM1 suite, which helps businesses to more accurately and quickly perform multiple financial tasks. The new features in TM1 make it easier for customers to do more sophisticated financial reporting and consolidations.

The enhancements include wizard-based procedures for rapidly importing financial data and quickly deploying new performance management applications, dashboards and scorecards. Additionally, Applix now offers TM1 Financial Consolidations, which supports journal entries, inter-company eliminations and other activities specific to the consolidation process.

"Financial reporting and consolidation is not the end of the process - it is the beginning," commented David Menninger, vice-president, worldwide marketing and product management, Applix, Inc. "Good financial planning begins with the `actuals`, is followed by a planning process and ends with a comparison of the subsequent actual results to the plan.

"The ability to access information from multiple sources, present it in an easy-to-use, familiar environment and act upon it for everything from reporting to planning to forecasting enables companies to reduce cycle times, increase competitiveness and have greater trust in the information," continued Menninger.

"The TM1 BPM platform, with its widely recognised real-time analytics, now provides all the components needed for sophisticated but streamlined performance management activities."

As defined by the worldwide BPM Standards Group, BPM enables a business to define, measure and manage its performance against strategic goals. The core financial and operational process of BPM includes planning, consolidation and reporting, analysis and the deployment of linked key performance indicators (KPI`s) throughout an organisation.

Applix TM1 now provides wizards for easily importing data from GL, accounting and legacy systems into BPM applications. Whereas many other approaches require writing rules or mandate inflexible out-of-the-box procedures, TM1 gives customers an easy to set up, easy to use reporting structures and GL procedures reflecting their chart(s) of accounts, including trial balance report, income statement, balance sheet and cash flow.

These wizards allow customers to put BPM applications into production quickly, seeing return on investment immediately.

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Financial consolidations are a primary activity for most mid-sized businesses and large enterprises. TM1 supports consolidation activities with industry-leading and unique features, including:

* Currency conversion, including unlimited number of reporting and transactional currencies;

* Automated inter-company eliminations;

* Standard and custom journal entry reporting with full support for recurring and reversing journal entries and export journals back to GL systems;

* Strict security provisions to ensure entries can only be posted by designated individuals to the appropriate entities; and

* A full audit trail maintained for every transaction.

By choosing a single platform approach, customers are relieved of integration headaches, ensured of interoperability among BPM and financial applications and provided with import and export capabilities for GL systems ranging from Great Plains to Oracle and ERP applications, such as SAP and PeopleSoft.

Recognising the ubiquity and almost non-existent learning curve of Microsoft Excel and browser-based applications, Applix uses these front-end solutions for presentation, analysis, dashboarding and report creation. Additionally, TM1 is integrated with many third-party reporting and front-end solutions such as Microsoft Reporting Services and arcplan`s dynasight. "Financial consolidation has been and remains a key component in nearly all BPM implementations," added Ian Ahern, president and CEO, Stratature, Inc.

"These new features from Applix make it easier for customers to quickly deploy applications for more precise, rapid and auditable financial reports by embedding key consolidation features into the Applix product suite. By embedding essential financial consolidation capabilities into the product, customers benefit from faster implementations, thus reducing costs; the system is operational sooner; and customers can maintain their own applications more easily. As more and more companies move from quarterly reporting to continuous reporting cycles, the ability to report and react quickly will help them to be more competitive and strategic."