Most organizations either perform financial consolidations in their accounting package, in spreadsheets or in a dedicated financial reporting application. CPM's philosophy is that this information should be stored in a single integrated platform with your budgeting & forecasting information. Why?
| 1. | You have already mapped links between your accounting package and CPM for the upload of actual information for variance reports and reforecast templates. |
| 2. | CPM's tight security can be leveraged to control which Managers see what information. |
| 3. | CPM's detect and alert, traffic lighting and drill through to actual capabilities can be leveraged for Manager accountability on variances. |
| 4. | CPM's OLAP database and excel like-interface can be used to create highly formatted reports with trustworthy information. |
| 5. | CPM's reports can be created by Finance and set up to maintain themselves when new accounts or business units are added. |
There is of course additional functionality required to perform financial consolidation.
Organizational Structure
The CPM database allows you to fully or partially in the case of minority interests or joint ventures, consolidate business units together. New business units can be set to automatically integrate into existing roll-ups. Multiple hierarchies can be established to support multiple roll-ups of your business units i.e. pre vs. post elimination or management vs. financial reporting. In the case of multiple currencies, each business unit can be assigned an input currency.
Period ending processes
CPM's journal entry capability can be set up to automate month end entries such as eliminating entries and accruals. CPM's allocation manager can be used to create fully contributed P&Ls by tax entity to properly calculate taxes. CPM reports will automatically pick up new business units, new accounts and calculated exchange rate differences. CPM's report books can be used to automate the month-end distribution of reports into your desired file format out to your desired reviewers at your desired time.
