Softworx embraces IBM's Cognos FSR to help companies improve financial reporting

At a well-attended business breakfast event last week, Softworx, an EOH Group Company, launched the IBM Cognos FSR product to its Softworx and EOH customer base. Ryan Muller, account manager at IBM, confirmed IBM's satisfaction that EOH/Softworx, a significant IBM partner, is adopting this new offering in the South African market.

Regulatory authorities around the world have been pursuing the enhancement of business and financial reporting for a number of years, including mandating public companies to disclose financial information in an interactive data format. New legislation is creating a new approach to information access and analysis in order to improve transparency.

“Local companies face pressure to comply with the regulations set out in the King III report on corporate governance and other increased disclosure stipulations, as well as sustainability reporting,” says Softworx MD Jane Thomson. “As a result, organisations need to develop a long-term strategy, not only to comply with these regulations, but to exploit them for competitive advantage,” she says.

The IBM Cognos FSR system is at the forefront of financial reporting and disclosure tools, enabling organisations to improve their financial reporting, comply with new regulations, and decrease costs. Cognos FSR is an IBM product that will be added to the Softworx portfolio of IBM Cognos solutions that Softworx already offers.

It allows companies to prepare all their statutory and financial information, such as annual reports and quarterly reports, in-house, instead of having to send it out to external parties to compile, control and organise for them. “Moving financial reporting in-house will prove valuable to many companies, and will help them to develop a strategy for future increased disclosure requirements,” says Thomson.

Cognos FSR is the ultimate software solution to integrate an organisation's financial statement production into the financial consolidation process, providing improved efficiency, reduced risk and greater control of the external reporting process. Cognos FSR makes it possible to transfer financial statements in a controlled environment, using a workflow collaboration process that is auditable and has visibility and transparency.

It can also apply extensible business reporting language (XBRL) tags for external disclosure that will aid in passing financial information to regulatory agencies. This workflow process also has the capability to extend into other critical areas, such as tax reporting, International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) reconciliations, generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) and financial-close management.

Cognos FSR provides a collaborative environment where many contributors can participate in the creation of the external document, within a secure environment, with a tight audit trail, and with a seamless connection to source data.

The system's features include linking source data to report data, meaning that a single change in the source data filters through the report, creating one version of the truth. It is easy to use, with an interface that leverages all the formatting capabilities of MS Word and the calculation abilities of MS Excel.

Cognos FSR uses previous reports as a template for the next report, automatically loading source data into a report template that is pre-formatted, enabling the user to focus on editing the document, rather than collecting, consolidating and formatting data.

Cognos FSR also provides a comprehensive audit trail, tracking each change, and who made it. The system can also easily tag financial commentary and data. The Taxonomy Manager, Taxonomy Editor and Taxonomy Designer extend the company-specific taxonomy to meet the latest filing regulations, and the XBRL Viewer lets users view the final XBRL report.

Cognos FSR is able to integrate with online research systems, and enable users to directly access analysis, regulations and standards and new regulatory developments. The workflow process tracks the status of each section of the document, with due dates and responsibility assignments. The administrator is able to track the status of each section of the document, which sections are overdue and who is responsible.

Overall, Cognos FSR reduces personnel costs associated with the extra work of producing external reports; lowers external costs, such as auditor fees, printing fees and typesetting fees; reduces risks, such as factual errors, late filing, insider leaks and non-compliance; and reduces overall cycle time for the producing of external reports.

“The system is exactly what CFOs need in order to reduce the cost of compliance, while minimising the risk of non-compliance at the same time,” says Thomson.

“We see the addition of Cognos FSR to our service offering as a great adder of value to our customer community, and are delighted to be partnering with IBM on this initiative. We have a longstanding partnership with IBM in implementing its world-class products in the South African market, and we look forward to partnering with it on other initiatives in the future,” concludes Thomson.