Financial Performance and Strategy Management Applications

What is financial performance management?

Also known as corporate performance management, financial performance management refers to the ways that a company manages and monitors financial results across an organization. The primary purpose of financial performance management is to compare actual results to budgets and forecasts and make adjustments accordingly. The result? Companies are better equipped to meet their business goals.

Ventana Research describes financial performance management as a specific set of capabilities that includes "defining their company's key performance indicators, formulating strategic plans and forecasts, handling performance reporting, and increasing finance operational efficiency and execution company-wide.”

What is financial performance management software?

Financial performance management software, also known as corporate performance management software, streamlines financial management processes. This software connects budgeting, planning, close, consolidation, reporting, and disclosure to a single data source. It enables users to complete these tasks in one software system, as opposed to many separate systems.

In essence, financial performance management software consolidates information, formats it to meet compliance requirements, and provides automated tools that enable finance to create regulatory reports and disclosures. In addition to a central data repository and workflow tools, financial performance management software has features to create, manage, validate, and publish financial statements and reports. Best-in-class financial performance management software even has a robust suite of communication tools that foster collaboration and improve audit controls.

What are the benefits of corporate performance management?

Corporate performance management helps companies become more agile when faced with unexpected business events. With features like KPI dashboards, real-time data, and responsive plans that change as actuals do, CFOs and finance executives can understand what’s happening and take action faster.

Corporate performance management helps companies make better decisions. CPM systems often have automated features like scenario modeling, rolling forecasts, and what-if scenarios analysis. Using these in combination with a single version of automated data, executives can better analyze performance, respond to change, and make more informed decisions.

Corporate performance management helps companies focus on analysis. Using corporate performance software, users spend less time on manual tasks like data collection and data entry. Instead, they can focus their time on value-added activities like analyzing profitability, reducing costs, business partnering with executive decision-makers, and developing a strategy.

Corporate performance management helps companies interpret large amounts of data quickly. CPM as we know it is evolving. Once CPM was purely financial management. Today, organizations are sitting on a treasure trove of information, that if adequately managed, could provide telling insights about the state of business and the direction decision-makers should take next. Modernized CPM solutions help financial users identify these underlying trends, unearth insights, and interpret large amounts of data quickly.

Corporate performance management aligns the entire organization, from corporate to subsidiaries to divisions to LoBs, departments, and individual contributors all in a single solution. CPM software aligns every part of the organization to a central data source, so collaborators make all decisions, create reports, and perform analysis with financial truth top of mind and with finance at the heart of every decision.