We are a manufacturer of technical equipment with worldwide branches and foreign representatives, and we are looking for software for financial and corporate performance management that can be set up quickly. The software should map and support integrated profit, financial, and balance sheet planning, consolidation (capital, debt, AuE, and interim profit), and consolidated financial statements.
Overview of required functions of the planning, consolidation, reporting, and analysis software:
General
- Database/data warehouse (financial, business, and accounting aspects)
- Integration of consolidation, planning, and controlling
- Support for
- P&L
- Balance sheet
- Cash flow statement
- Multiple different P&L and balance sheet structures
- P&L according to total cost method
- P&L according to cost of sales method
- IFRS balance sheet
- Support
- Statement of changes in equity
- Fixed asset schedule
- Provision schedule
- Credit schedule
- Maturity schedule
- Automatic derivation of a cash flow statement
- Automatic currency conversion (in plan and actual) with, for example
- Spot rate
- Average rate
- Year-to-date rate
- Historical rates
- Support for different fiscal and short fiscal years
- Consolidation of heterogeneous investments in a database with a uniform P&L, balance sheet structure, and cash flow statement
- Presentation of investments by organizational units, segments, and regions
- Individual covenants and KPIs
- Automatic account assignment based on predefined charts of accounts or structural data information
- Workflow support including task management and automatic email notification
- Multilingual
- Drill-down to posting record and document level
- Database-based comments
Consolidation
- Consolidated financial statements per month, quarter, year:
- P&L
- Balance sheet
- Cash flow statement
- Support for various accounting standards, such as:
- HGB (German Commercial Code)
- IFRS
- US-GAAP
- Mapping of multiple companies and presentation of subgroups (multi-level consolidation hierarchies)
- Reporting and consolidation of various segments
- Different foreign and group currencies
- Support for reconciliation entries
- Capital consolidation:
- Full
- Proportional
- At equity
- Presentation of minority interests and minority interests in profits
- Expense and income consolidation
- Debt consolidation
- Elimination of interim results in current and fixed assets
- Consideration of deferred taxes#
- Other notes
Planning
- Presentation of actual, planned, and forecast data on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis over any period of time
- Presentation of best- and worst-case scenarios
- Display of:
- Profit centers
- Cost units
- Cost centers
- Derivation of indirect cash flow statement
- Display of direct liquidity planning
- Planning and analysis of other operating key figures, e.g.:
- Number of employees
- Production volumes
- Prices
- Product sales
- Corporate planning from profit, investment, and financing planning:
- P&L
- Balance sheet
- Liquidity
- Dynamic planning on a
- monthly basis
- quarterly basis
- annual basis
- Mapping of sub-plans at
- cost center level or
- cost unit level
- Support for long planning periods
- Automated plan transfer of actual balances (e.g., receivables, payables)
- Support for scenarios
- Intra-year rolling plans and forecasts
- Support for loan planning and current account interest, investments, seasonal forecasts
- Bottom-up planning, top-down planning
- Data import
Group reporting (collection and validation of data relevant to the consolidated financial statements)
- Individual reports
- Decentralized data collection via the web
- Intercompany reconciliation of balances or individual documents in transaction currency
- Data validation, plausibility checks, test routines
- Display of process progress
- Monitoring of approval processes
- Documentation
- Ad hoc reporting via freely definable views (e.g., target/actual comparisons, comparison of investments)
- Export function for further processing of data
- Data import
Reporting and analysis
- Comparison options (e.g., plan vs. actual, actual vs. actual previous year)
- Deviation analysis
- Excel integration
- Visualization
- Reports and evaluations
- Management cockpit
- Key figures
- Interfaces
Software architecture
- Multi-user and Internet-enabled
- High performance
- Single sign-on
- Integratable
- Unicode-capable
- SSL encryption
Data import
- from our ERP and accounting systems
- MS Excel and SQL
- Drill-down to document level
- Automatic account assignment
- Monitoring of all data imports
Approximately 10 software workstations are planned.