Drill-down directly to the source system from any Actuals field

Description

In the context of financial planning, most planning data will be from the General Ledger and will be included in “Actuals” on various sheets inside the tool. It can be helpful to see exactly where those actuals came from in order to answer specific questions or gain confidence in the reliability of the numbers. In this requirement, the CPM system must allow a direct link from the CPM application into a ledger or ERP tool and render the exact transactions from that field. Importantly, this requirement specifies that the drill-through should work from any field, not just specific fields that are narrowly defined.

Example Use Case

Scenario: A large manufacturing company uses CPM software to manage its financial performance. The financial director finds an unexpected fluctuation in materials costs on the P&L during a monthly review.

Solution: Using the drill-down feature, the director can navigate from that Actuals field right to the source system to identify the specific transactions causing the discrepancy. After identifying that the cost increase is due to certain suppliers increasing their prices, the director can develop a strategy to negotiate costs or search for alternative suppliers.

Considerations

This functionality is limited to a few vendors who can really do it well. Even those vendors struggle to do it well across different ledger and ERP technology due to the architecture of those systems. For example, some web-based ledger tools will accept a formatted URL that will query the system and show results. This is relatively easy to configure. Others may require a custom API query which usually requires a consultant spend to make functional.

Beware systems that offer a drill-to-source functionality that only drop you off at an aggregated report, leaving you to find those exact transactions yourself.

Also beware of pricing. Not everyone in the planning system has or needs a license to the ledger - and in most cases, we would recommend against that. They'll need some sort of license to drill into the source system. We recommend that this functionality be reserved for specific people on the finance and accounting team.

Questions to Ask a Vendor

• Source System Connectivity: Can the CPM system natively drill back into our specific system? If not, can it be customized to do so?
• Source Drill-Through Granularity: Will it drill to summarized information or the specific transactions in our source system?
• **Real-**Life Use: Does the drill-through really work with ANY field in the system?