Tagetik Advances Disclosure Management for Office of Finance

Tagetik provides financial performance management software. One particularly useful aspect of its suite is the Collaborative Disclosure Management (CDM). CDM addresses an important need in finance departments, which routinely generate highly formatted documents that combine words and numbers. Often these documents are assembled by contributors outside of the finance department; human resources, facilities, legal and corporate groups are the most common. The data used in these reports almost always come from multiple sources – not just enterprise systems such as ERP and financial consolidation software but also individual spreadsheets and databases that collect and store nonfinancial data (such as information about leased facilities, executive compensation, fixed assets, acquisitions and corporate actions). Until recently, these reports were almost always cobbled together manually – a painstaking process made even more time-consuming by the need to double-check the documents for accuracy and consistency. The adoption of a more automated approach was driven by the requirement imposed several years ago by United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that companies tag their required periodic disclosure filings using eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL), which I have written about. This mandate created a tipping point in the workload, making the manual approach infeasible for a large number of companies and motivating them to adopt tools to automate the process. Although disclosure filings were the initial impetus to acquire collaborative disclosure management software, companies have found it useful for generating a range of formatted periodic reports that combine text and data, including board books (internal documents for senior executives and members of the board of directors), highly formatted periodic internal reports and filings with nonfinancial regulators or lien holders.

Tagetik’s Collaborative Disclosure Management automates the document creation process, eliminating many repetitive, mechanical functions and reducing the time needed to administer the process and ensure accuracy. Automation can shorten finance processes significantly. For example, our benchmark research on trends in developing the fast, clean close finds that companies that use little or no automation in their accounting close take almost twice as long to complete the process as those that fully automate it (9.1 days vs. 5.7 days). Manually assembling the narrative text from perhaps dozens of contributors and combining it with data used in tables and elsewhere in the document is a time-consuming chore. Regulatory filings are legal documents that must be completely accurate and conform to mandated presentation styles. They require careful review to ensure accuracy and completeness. Complicating this effort recently are increasingly stringent deadlines, especially in the U.S. Anyone who has been a party to these efforts knows that there can be frequent changes in the narratives and presentation of the numbers as they are reviewed by different parties, and those responsible need to ensure that any change to a number that occurs is automatically reflected everywhere that amount is cited in the document; to use the depreciation and amortization figure as an example, that would include the statement of cash flows, income statement, the text of the management discussion and analysis and the text or tables of one or more footnotes. Moreover, automated systems afford greater control over the data used. They make it possible to answer the common question of where a number came from quickly and with complete assurance. While inaccuracies in other types of financial documents may not have legal consequences, mistakes can have reputational or financial consequences.

Those managing the process also spend a great deal of energy simply checking the document to ensure that the various sections include the latest wording, that the numbers are consistent in the tables and text, that amounts have been rounded properly (which can be really complicated) and that the right people have signed off on every part of the filing. Automation obviates the need for much of these tasks. Tagetik’s CDM workflow-enables the process, so handoffs are automated, participants get alerts if they haven’t completed their steps in timely fashion, and administrators can keep track of where everyone is in the process. Workflow also promotes consistent execution of the process, and the workflows can be easily modified as needed.

In designing Collaborative Disclosure Management, Tagetik took advantage of users’ widespread familiarity with Microsoft Excel and Word to reduce the amount of training required to use its product. CDM’s workflow design makes it relatively easy for business users to define and modify business process automation. Typically, individuals or small groups work on different sections of the document. CDM enables multiple contributors from finance, accounting, legal, corporate and other functions to work with their part of the document without being concerned about other contributors’ versions. Work can proceed smoothly, and those administering the process can see at any time which components have been completed, are in progress or have not even started. Tagetik’s software can cut the time required to prepare any periodic document, since once a company has configured its system to create what is in effect a template, it’s relatively easy to generate these documents on monthly, quarterly or annual bases. The numbers relevant to the current period are updated from the specified controlled sources, and references to tabular data within the text are automatically adjusted to tie back to these new figures. Often a large percentage of the narrative text is boilerplate that either must not be updated or requires only limited editing to reflect new information. Starting with the previous edition of the report, contributors can quickly mark up a revised version, and reviewers can focus only on what has changed. Other important automation features are data validation, which reduces errors and revisions, and the system’s ability to round numbers using the appropriate statutory methodology.

CDM also handles XBRL tagging, which is essential for all SEC documents and necessary for an increasing number of regulatory filings around the world. The software specifically handles tagging for the two main European prudential regulatory filings for banks and other credit extending institutions, COREP (Common Reporting related to capital) and FINREP (Financial Reporting performed in a consistent fashion across multiple countries).

Companies can gain several key benefits by automating the production of their periodic regulatory filings and internal or external financial reports that combine text and data. One of the most important is time. Automation can substantially reduce the time that highly trained and well-compensated people spend on mechanical tasks (freeing them to do more productive things), and the process can be completed sooner. Having the basic work completed sooner gives senior executives and outside directors more time to review the document before it must be filed or made public. Time that can be devoted to considering how best to polish the narratives or if necessary lengthen upstream deadlines to handle last-minute developments and consider options for how best to treat accounting events. Automation can also reduce the chance of errors, since the numbers tie directly back to the source systems and (if properly configured) ensure that references in the narratives and footnotes to items in tables and the numbers in those table agree completely. Restatements of financial reports caused by errors are relatively rare but when they occur are exceptionally costly for public companies’ reputations.

Disclosure management systems are an essential component for any financial performance management (FPM) system. All midsize and larger corporations should be using this software to automate the production of their periodic mandated filings and other documents that combine text and data. They will find that they are useful in cutting the time and effort required to produce these documents, provide senior executives and directors more time to review and craft the final versions, and reduce the chance of errors in the process. Companies that are using older FPM software should investigate replacing it with an FPM suite to gain the additional capabilities – including disclosure management – that newer suites offer. Tagetik’s should be among the financial systems evaluated for office of finance.

Regards,

Robert Kugel – SVP Research

Oracle Hyperion Products Challenged by New Generation of Expectations

Oracle continues to enrich the capabilities of its Hyperion suite of applications that support the finance function, but I wonder if that will be enough to sustain its market share and new generation of expectations. At the recent Oracle OpenWorld these new features were on display, and spokespeople described how the company will be transitioning its software to cloud deployment. Our 2013 Financial Performance Management Value (FPM) Index rates Oracle Hyperion a Warm vendor in my analysis, ranking eighth out of nine vendors. Our Value Index is informed by more than a decade of analysis of technology suppliers and their products and how well they satisfy specific business and IT needs. We perform a detailed evaluation of product functionality and suitability-to-task as well as the effectiveness of vendor support for the buying process and customer assurance. Our assessment reflects two disparate sets of factors. On one hand, the Hyperion FPM suite offers a broad set of software that automates, streamlines and supports a range of finance department functions. It includes sophisticated analytical applications. Used to full effect, Hyperion can eliminate many manual steps and speed execution of routine work. It also can enhance accuracy, ensure tasks are completed on a timely basis, foster coordination between Finance and the rest of the organization and generate insights into corporate performance. For this, the software gets high marks.

Unfortunately, this FPM suite remains more difficult to deploy and maintain than other vendors’ suites, and its user experience is becoming dated. As well, social collaboration is increasingly important in business, especially to fit specific requirements of the finance function, as I recently noted. Oracle understands that it must address changing user experience requirements as the baby boomers retire and are replaced by people who have fundamentally different expectations of how software is supposed to work. While there was plenty of evidence at OpenWorld that Oracle is taking steps to remedy this at a corporate level, it’s up to individual units to implement changes to their software portfolio, and it’s not clear that this is a priority for the Hyperion group. But in other areas, Oracle is busy addressing gaps in its FPM offerings. It is adding mobile enablement to Hyperion Financial Management and Planning, starting with an executive approval application to ensure that necessary signoffs can occur anywhere to speed the completion of routine work. To address the growing popularity of its cloud-based rivals, Oracle’s long-awaited Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service should be available by the end of 2013, providing budgeting, planning, collaborative forecasting and reporting as services to companies. And the company is offering financial and management and reporting in the cloud to streamline production and delivery of reports.

Hyperion still has the strongest franchise in the finance function, the legacy of achieving early market dominance in software for consolidation, reporting, planning and budgeting. It succeeded because it gave the finance department autonomy from IT with applications designed by people who understood their needs. Hyperion offers a rich set of capabilities to automate the extended close cycle – all of the activities that start with the preclosing functions and continue through completion of external reporting. Our recent benchmark research on the financial close found a correlation between the time it takes a company to close and the degree of automation that it applies to the process. On average, those with a high degree of automation are able to close their books in 5.7 days, compared to 9.1 days for those that apply little or no automation. Oracle’s Financial Close Suite of applications is designed to enable companies to execute their period-end close faster and more accurately while requiring fewer resources. This is important because managing their close well is an issue for more than half of companies. Our research found that 61 percent of corporations take more than six business days to complete their quarterly or semiannual close (the consensus best practice is closing within six business days). Rather than achieving a faster close, which 83 percent of companies said is important or very important, the research found that on average it takes a day longer for companies to close than it took them five years earlier. In conjunction with better process design, using software to automate manual processes, manage all phases of process execution and limit the use of desktop spreadsheets is an effective way to shorten a company’s close cycle. Oracle’s Financial Management Analytics allows finance executives to closely monitor this extended close cycle.

One recent addition to Oracle Hyperion’s Financial Close Suite is Tax Provision. Accurately calculating and reporting direct (income) taxes is a time-consuming, labor-intensive process for almost all midsize and larger companies. I’ve written about the importance of using technology to bring the tax function into mainstream finance. There are two necessary IT elements to managing this process. One is ensuring that all of the data needed for provisioning and any subsequent audit is readily available. An option here is a tax data warehouse for companies that have a large number of legal entities and/or operate in multiple tax jurisdictions. Hyperion doesn’t have this capability. However, for companies that have less complex requirements or just want to simplify and centralize the gathering of tax data, it provides the second necessary element: an environment that manages tax data collection, improves the accuracy of the data and the calculations (by substantially reducing the need for desktop spreadsheets and rekeying of data from source systems) and automates data movement through configurable wizards. Especially in the quarterly and year-end accounting closes, numerous adjustments may take place that can affect the tax provision or changes in tax calculations that can have an impact on reported results. A tax provision application can speed up the back-and-forth adjustments, helping to shorten the accounting close cycle. It also can enhance the effectiveness of the tax function because those professionals will have more time to spend on analysis and optimizing a company’s tax position rather than wrestling with spreadsheets.

Oracle has added important new capabilities to its FPM suite since acquiring Hyperion. Expanding the suite has helped the company sustain its franchise in the face of determined competition from large to smaller sized software vendors such as IBM, Infor and SAP, as well as smaller ones including Adaptive Planning, Anaplan, Host Analytics, Longview and Tagetik. The generational change that’s under way in corporations poses a serious competitive threat to Oracle. For finance professionals, word of mouth and brand loyalty count far more than “enchanted boxes” or “undulations”: That’s how Hyperion came to dominate the market. But times change, and Oracle is vulnerable because of the time and cost of deployment, ease of use and maintenance and user experience of its FPM suite. These were reflected in our 2013 Financial Performance Management Value Index. This year’s OpenWorld demonstrated that Oracle can pivot – albeit slowly – to address a rapidly evolving applications software market. With Hyperion it needs to focus more on addressing core competitive issues if it expects to sustain a leading market position.

Regards,

Robert Kugel – SVP Research