Executive Circle on Performance Management

20
Jun 2012
 
19
Jun 2012
Event
20 June, 2012 to 19 June, 2012
Pastorale, Rumst

This Executive Circle, an exclusive element61-event by invitation only, will focus on :

Automation of Financial Statement Reporting and Management books

Most CFO’s are part of organizations that have invested heavily in the streamlining and automation of their operational finance processes by implementing ERP software. A lot of them have also automated their statutory and management consolidation process and financial reporting using Corporate Performance Management applications. This trend has been strengthened by the arrival of more integrated CPM software solution suites promising "Closed loop Performance Management”.

All of these elements have contributed to a much more automated generation of the consolidated financial statements (actuals, budgets and forecasts). But organizations typically still invest a lot of time during their monthly or quarterly and annual close process on a number of additional activities that are crucial to produce internal management reporting books as well as to deliver external reporting to a growing number of instances and regulators. These activities typically include producing a management summary & discussion of the numbers, the generation of disclosures, incorporating comments and observations in written text, incorporating non-financial indicators and producing and delivering the reported information to the different stakeholders (Executive Committee, Board of Directors, regulatory bodies and the "Market”), ideally including an approval workflow within the own organization.

These additional activities, performed after the consolidated figures are made available, are often referred to as "the last mile of finance" or "disclosure management solutions”. Although these "last mile activities” are as critical as the production of the figures by the CPM solutions to deliver accurate internal and external reports, automation of these activities has been lagging and the process is still mainly manual with the help of Excel and Word. This is a considerable risk as these tools are not designed to be collaborative tools and certainly cannot provide adequate security and segregation of duties functionality nor do they provide an adequate audit trail which is typically what the closing process requires. The Executive Circle will make you discover this innovative new category of Disclosure Management software and will include a demo of IBM Cognos FSR, Financial Statement Reporting.