Finance vs Controller

[inigoartamendi]

Hi you all,

I´m Iñigo. This is the first time I'm in. I am comparing the specs of Finance vs Controller for as part of a tool selection document.

I've been searching in the net, but, when it comes to consolidation, I was not able to find out how far  Finance can go.

I know Finance is discontinued and Controller is a more specific tool for consolidation.

I've been implementing Controller in some projects and I know it works fine for legal consolidation, but I know nothing about Finance.

I would like to know:

1)Does Finance cover legal consolidation? Full consolidation, proportionate and equity method

If it does...

2) What kind of data category does Finance cover for legal consolidation (real, budgeted, forecast...)

3) Does Finance consider exchange rate management and eliminations related to inter-company operations in different currencies

4) Does it allow to define different consolidation perimeters, depending on the consolidation type- legal, management, financial... - and method - full, proportionate, equity... )

5) Does it allow to define diferent account structures for legal and managent consolidation?

6) Inter-company eliminations: does Finance carry out consolidation automatically (except for compulsory manual adjustments)?

7) How is reporting in Finance? Is it easy to format and allocate in excel?

Cool How is data uploading for consolidation perimeter and general ledger? does it allow to set up a sort of Computer Aided Test Tool (CATT in SAP) for data uploading?

Thanks in advance

[AIsfas095]

Hello,

Perhaps I could be of assistance on Cognos Finance.

Let me answer your questions one at a time:

1)  Cognos Finance ("CF") can cover your consolidations any way that you would like to set it up in the system.  Full, proportionate or equity.  It is all dependent on how creative you want to become.

2)  CF can handle any type of data you would like.  It has "submissions" which are essentially the type of data you are looking at.  For example you could have 09Act which would be your 2009 actuals, 10Act which would be your 2010 actuals, 09Bud which would be your 2009 Budget and 10Bud which would be your 2010 Budget.  You could also create a submission which would have the first two months of actuals from 2010 and then append the remaining months from the 2010 budget to get a view of what the entity would look like if it ran according to plan.

3)  Controller handles the different currencies in inter-company eliminations much better than CF.  CF only does the currencies in the native currency of the entity you are looking at.  For example, all inter-company eliminations are in US Dollars for a U.S. based company.

4)  You can have as many hierarchies as you want.  You can use a single company in multiple hierarchies.  Be careful with the number of hierarchies as this will have an impact on calculation times.

5)  You can have different account structures also. 

6)  Yes, you can design the inter-company eliminations to be automatic.  It will even change the eliminations should you change the hierarcy.

7)  Generally, reporting is done out of CF.  However, you can also do it out of Excel.  The reporting in CF allows you to drill into the data and to pivot the drill.

You can set up a template for file processing.  The file processing can work off either a flat file or a SQL script.

Hope this helps.