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Financial Analyzer
Overview
Oracle Financial Analyzer is a powerful integrated enterprise decision support system that adds value to a strategic finance organization. It is a distributed application for financial reporting, analysis, budgeting, and planning. By integrating a central source of management data with powerful analytical tools, the system enables organizations to meet their critical financial objectives—to control costs, analyze performance, evaluate opportunities, and formulate future direction.
Business Needs
With Oracle Financial Analyzer you can:
Manage up to thousands of users with access controls
Eliminate the need for hundreds of disconnected spreadsheets
Model your business, regardless of industry
Provide access through spreadsheets and popular browsers
Create, review, modify, and communicate budgets and forecasts
Support budgeting at either the department or enterprise level
Provide profitability reports for all levels of the organization
Access financial information at the right level to identify areas for profit improvement
Slice and dice information in any way you choose
Load budget data back into Oracle General Ledger
Major Features
Controlled Data Access
Ensuring consistent and reliable financial information is key to Oracle Financial Analyzer. The product maintains the integrity of financial data in a central source and ensures that users are able to access the data they need, both locally and at remote sites. Access controls allow the administrator to determine, by user, which financial data can be viewed and edited. Users, therefore, see and manage only the information that is pertinent to their responsibilities and interests. Executives might receive summarized data tailored to their needs, while lower level managers might receive both detail and summary data.
Data flows both to and out of Financial Analyzer
Adaptable Business Model
Oracle Financial Analyzer adapts to any organization’s business structures, such as cost centers, products, services, and retail outlets. Businesses do not have to change their perspectives and processes to conform to Oracle Financial Analyzer; the product can reflect any existing business. Additionally, the product’s models and data can be modified quickly to reflect new or potential business scenarios as well as organizational changes. Scaleable to meet the data capacity requirements of your growing business, Oracle Financial Analyzer reduces the amount of time required for data management, affording users more time to focus on qualitative analysis.
Flexible Network Architecture
Today’s financial management systems are most effective when they can be utilized by more than just the members of the Finance department. Organizations need to provide financial information to, and collect data from, a variety of end users across networks and countries. Oracle Financial Analyzer delivers financial data and robust data analysis and collection tools throughout the organization via an easy-to-use client layer. These clients, accessed from your desktop, can be OFA specific, spreadsheet or web-based, offering flexibility to suit all your organization's needs. The variety of system configuration options of Oracle Financial Analyzer allows you to tailor the application’s unique, distributed architecture to the needs and location of your financial managers. Flexible access and architectural design provide a networked application with great processing power, speed and control to handle the data volumes and complexity of your current and future financial management challenges.
Distributed Budgeting and Forecasting
Oracle Financial Analyzer handles budget and forecast creation, review, modification, and communication within the same system. The product coordinates and streamlines the budgeting process, whether organizations use top-down, bottom-up, or mixed budgeting methodologies. Oracle Financial Analyzer can allocate budget objectives at high levels—such as quarter and division—to lower levels, such as month and department. Users can copy last year’s actuals into this year’s budget and grow certain balances by five percent. Users can store slices of the corporate financial database on personal computers to take their budgets and forecasts on the road. At the close of the budget cycle, the finalized budget is consolidated to provide enterprise access, and is locked to prohibit additional modification.
Comprehensive Reporting and Analysis
The multidimensional data model of Oracle Financial Analyzer reflects the way managers think about their business. Using market-leading technology, key information may be viewed across any combination of dimensions—line items, time periods, products, geographical regions, and cost centers. Multidimensional data navigation tools allow users to isolate the source of a variance quickly. These tools make it easy to query the financial performance of a profit center by product, channel, and time period. Specialized tools, like the Selector, offer querying and exception-based analyses. With multidimensional analysis, users can control and analyze financial data, as well as design and save personal reports and graphs, without having to involve MIS.
Extensive Financial Modeling
Oracle Financial Analyzer supports a wide variety of financial management tasks with its financial modeling tools. Results of what-if analyses display immediately. An extensive library of built-in functions helps users create forecasts and calculate performance ratios. Users can incorporate general ledger and non-general ledger data into analysis to derive, and then share, new financial data. Models are characterized by controlled independence. This independence allows users to establish different detailed equations for different organizations and scenarios, while consistent calculations are kept for universal or consolidated items.
Seamless Spreadsheet Links
Oracle Financial Analyzer leverages user knowledge of spreadsheet applications. On the desktop, the system links directly with industry standard spreadsheets so that users can submit, view and report Oracle Financial Analyzer data from those spreadsheets. This link also provides users in the spreadsheet environment with access to the powerful data query tools of the Selector.
Flexible Data Collection and Access
With its extensive loading capabilities, Oracle Financial Analyzer can easily accept and validate data from general ledgers, spreadsheets, relational databases, and other operational systems. Data collection tools such as spreadsheets and intranet browsers provide controlled acquisition of budget data across the entire organization.
The data stored within Oracle Financial Analyzer can be made accessible to the enterprise through the application interface, via spreadsheets, or over corporate intranets. Throughout the enterprise, users can be given controlled access to Oracle Financial Analyzer intranet Web sites, with the ability to rotate, drill and further investigate the multidimensional data contained in those reports.
Oracle General Ledger Integration
Oracle Financial Analyzer seamlessly integrates with Oracle General Ledger. This integration eliminates the need for duplicate data entry and structural maintenance, and thereby provides a more cost-effective financial management solution. Oracle General Ledger information easily maps to Oracle Financial Analyzer where it is reported, analyzed, combined with other non-general ledger data, and used as the basis for budgets, forecasts and plans. Oracle General Ledger account balances are reflected in Oracle Financial Analyzer. With a permanent link between the two applications, modifications to hierarchies and other structures performed in the General Ledger flow through to Oracle Financial Analyzer without additional maintenance. Data and structures can be automatically refreshed on a regular basis so that data control and integrity are preserved. Budgets created in Oracle Financial Analyzer can be stored in Oracle General Ledger for comparative general ledger reporting.
Key Features
Ad Hoc Query and Analysis
Create multidimensional business analyses
Rank organizations based on performance
Analyze current, historical and projected data
Perform diverse analyses, such as: product profitability, exception analysis, product mix analysis, variance analysis, funds allocation and activity based costing
Drill into the details of report data
Query and submit data from within MS-Excel
Financial Modeling
Use over 100 modeling and data manipulation functions
Perform allocations, simulations and validation routines
Manage simultaneous equations
Create what-if analyses
Perform time-series analyses
Incorporate general ledger data and non-general ledger data
Budgeting, Forecasting, and Planning
Budget at the corporate, divisional and operational levels
Define an unlimited number of budgets, forecasts and plans
Phase, allocate and trend data
Use built-in functions, such as spread, copy and grow
Base forecasts on historical data and anticipated business conditions
Build standard budget models for use throughout the organization
Reporting & Graphing
Display data multidimensionally
Distribute reports and graphs
Create and save personal reports and graphs
Insert additional calculations into report rows and columns
View data graphically in line, bar, pie, area or trend formats
Reorient views with drag-and-drop tools
Document supporting text in reports
Provide on-line data access via intranet Web sites and spreadsheets
Application and Data Administration
Interface with existing ledgers, RDBMS and spreadsheets
Centralize corporate data
Distribute data and analytical capabilities
Integrate data from Finance, Sales, Marketing and Manufacturing
Store data securely with data access controls
Handle sparse data with efficient storage
Manage data and structures in a tiered architecture for maximum efficiency
Support disconnected and mobile users
Support non-Oracle general ledgers
Oracle General Ledger Integration
Use existing calendar information
Analyze sections of chart of accounts and related segment values
Use account rollup structures
Use existing currency information
Automatically transfer information as often as needed
Transfer budgets created in Oracle Financial Analyzer to Oracle General Ledger
Access data at summary or detailed account level
Hardware and Software Requirements
Client:
IBM or compatible PC with, at minimum, a pentium processor
Windows NT and Windows 95 Clients for Financial Analyzer clients
Windows 3.1 is available for Web clients only
Excel 7.0 and higher
A minimum of 16 MB RAM
Server:
NT and Unix platforms, including: Intel NT, Alpha NT, Sun Solaris 2, IBM AIX (available February 1998), HP-UX (available April 1998)
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