Financial statements can be shown for any dimension such as Department

Description

This feature allows users to obtain detailed financial overviews according to various dimensions or organizational units, giving a comprehensive understanding of an organization's financial performance. This is beneficial for departmental, product, store, subsidiary, and location P&Ls amongst other useful applications.

Example Use Case

Scenario: A global retail corporation uses CPM software to understand its financial performance. They want to view financial statements such as income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements, not only for their entire organization but also for specific dimensions like individual departments or geographical regions.

Solution: The CPM software allows for financial statement viewing by any dimension. The company can pull up the detailed financial statement for the clothing department or for the regional sales in North America. This granularity helps in making more informed financial decisions and designing strategies at the micro-level.

Considerations

This useful functionality will save days of work in Excel producing custom financial statements for specific regions. Now, with a couple clicks, a financial statement for your Colorado stores can be generated instantaneously. This functionality is a core reason why buyers purchase CPM solutions in the first place - instant financial statements that show past performance and also show future plans in one spot.

Look out for products that can only provide statements at a summarized level - meaning subsidiary, or total business. You'll eventually want to dig deeper than that. This is why we always prefer systems that have flexibility in the way dimensions are used, as that paves the way for future usage that you may not have considered.

Questions to Ask a Vendor

• Dimension Flexibility: Can we use any combination of dimensions to view a financial statement? For example, can we see an Income Statement by “Location / Product / Product Category”?
• Past and Future: Are we able to view plan data in a financial statement using these dimensions, or is it only for actuals?
• Limitations: Are we limited to just reports, or can these statements be rendered in charts or sheets where we can also view by dimension?