Cognos extends its performance management offering for the office of finance with a sharp focus on compliance

Cognos 8 Controller version 8.2 offers a proven finance-managed application to support the close, consolidate, and report process; to ensure financial statement quality and close efficiency; and to meet modern compliance requirements.

Research by The Hackett Group shows that by reducing process, systems and control complexity, leading companies are able to operate with a more effective internal control environment. By doing do, they spend less on Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404 compliance, which has been a cash drain for many companies in recent years. Leading companies also spend less to perform their key control activities on an ongoing basis.

"Cognos really stands apart by allowing financial users to manage the change process effectively," said Andrea Evans, manager, financial accounts and systems, Royal & Sun Alliance.

"Our change management process for in-house changes generated a mountain of paperwork and used to take us a minimum of two days to complete. This will be attainable in less than a day with Controller version 8.2, with the new audit log eliminating the need for as many external controls," she added.

A key part of the Cognos performance management platform, Cognos 8 Controller version 8.2 is a comprehensive, web-based solution that enables finance teams to automate the entire close process (from data collection to financial consolidation to output), while reducing the close cycle time and ensuring data integrity. Controller version 8.2 enhancement highlights include:

Audit and compliance capabilities: Data lineage allows users to understand the date and time stamp of the data access and load, and maintain an original unchanged version of source data. This ensures data quality to support financial statements in the consolidation process. Audit trails allow users to track application and data changes, by user, with the date and time stamp - along with the ability to filter, evaluate and analyze their impact. In an age focused on internal controls, audit trails supply a reliable mechanism to support efficient and effective compliance.

"We've identified opportunities for compliance by strengthening the financial control framework with Controller version 8.2," said Raymond Pineda, partner, Deloitte. "Built-in application controls streamline the data validation process by reducing the risk for error and provide the CFO with the confidence to attest to the accuracy and completeness of their financial results."

Support for performance management: The seamless integration with Cognos 8 Planning and Cognos 8 Business Intelligence provides a single view of all operational and financial data, leveraging rich analytics, to support decision-making requirements.

"Our vision is to provide our managers with single-point access to all our business critical data - both financial and operating. We felt that Cognos had the capabilities and desire to make such an integration work," said Curt Petersen, CFO, CSM Corp.

"Cognos' unique combination of Controller/BI supporting a performance management platform, ease of use and powerful access tools made them a great fit for our needs," he added.

Advanced consolidation techniques: Different geographies and financial jurisdictions continually evolve their regulatory and financial reporting requirements. Controller version 8.2 includes deep domain capabilities to support these changing regulatory reporting needs.

"Cognos 8 Controller version 8.2 offers world-class capabilities for financial consolidation that deliver on compliance imperatives for financial controls while supporting efficiency in the close process, and reducing the amount of time required to consolidate financial results," said Derek Morrison, Regional General Manager, Cognos.

"Timely, complete, and accurate performance data is central to both compliance and performance management," added Morrison.