Finance differs from other forms of departments in that management reporting tends to take a higher priority over KPI’s and metrics. There is a need for several variations of standards reports such as profit and loss, trial balance and aged debtor reports.

One way Business Intelligence (BI) systems enable quick and accurate reporting is by using metadata modelling. Metadata is a way of describing your data to the BI system. Often the data is held in one place, being some form of financial system such as J.D Edwards or Coda Financials. As there are many very particular reporting requirements a tool that can deliver reports quickly, often using templates to keep a standard ‘look and feel’, is an advantage.

Standard financial packages often excel at storing financial data but have only a rudimentary querying system for reporting. BI allows reporting to be as sophisticated as you want it to be.

Data modelling for financial reports can often be complex. Often data must be retrieved from the database specifically for a particular report, which means tailoring SQL (the database language) in the modelling tool or report. Cognos 8 Business Intelligence has this facility.

Finally, reports once written are often scheduled to run overnight, possibly burst then emailed to predetermined recipients.

A financial reporting environment needs to be able to respond to end-of-month and end-of-year time pressures. Cognos 8 has fully scalable server technology and responds to administrative server tuning enabling throughput to be improved if required.