Best! Imperativ Analytics

Put an End to Your Budget Nightmares It's time to stop wasting valuable time reconciling numbers on spreadsheets. Time to eliminate countless hours of number crunching. You need a solution that will allow you to react to last minute changes in assumptions, incorporate the data you need (when you need it!) and make more informed business decisions. You need Best! Imperativ Active Planner. Our purpose-built enterprise-wide budgeting and planning software will give you: Shorter planning cycles Seamless integration with all enterprise data Automatic incorporation of key nonfinancial data Robust analysis feature Best! Imperativ Active Planner will transform your budget nightmare into a truly collaborative budgeting and planning process. With shorter planning cycles and time to focus on continuous performance improvement, you'll help your company realize its strategic goals.   Managing the Budgeting and Planning Process Best! Imperativ Active Planner offers robust management features to help make your budgeting and planning process more efficient and effective. Utilize bottom-up or top-down budgeting processes - or a combination of both. Whether you need to allocate a revenue target or cost projection from the top down, or consolidate several different budget plans from the bottom up, Best! Imperativ Active Planner accommodates your organizational structure and provides a purpose-built solution. Encourage budget collaboration across the enterprise. Strong management capabilities allow for seamless integration of budget submissions from multiple departments, using "Plan Sheets" that have a familiar spreadsheet look and feel. Plus, Best! Imperativ Active Planner’s "Web View" provides access to budgeting Plan Sheets at any time and from any location for participants across the enterprise. Take "command" of your budget. The Plan Manager, the "command center" of Best! Imperativ Active Planner, coordinates the consolidation and distribution of your Plan Sheets into an efficient, seamless and flexible budgetary system. Within Plan Manager, Plan Sheets are established, reviewed for status and revision, locked for control and managed for consolidation and distribution. Integrate your budget with enterprise data sources. Once your system is set up, Best! Imperativ Active Planner automatically integrates financial information from your general ledger. You can also calculate and deploy values from enterprise data sources including SQL Server, Access, Dbase, Excel, FoxPro and any ODBC or OLE-DB compliant database. Control access to sensitive data. Best! Imperativ Active Planner provides comprehensive security so you can easily limit use of plan sheets to authorized users - as well as define their ability to view, edit or modify information.   Analysis Features Provide More Powerful Insight Best! Imperativ Active Planner provides sophisticated multidimensional analysis tools with Microsoft® SQL 7.0 OLAPTM (Online Analytical Processing) services. You'll be able to visually analyze budgeting and planning data that is organized by your company's business drivers and variables and rapidly see the impact a change in assumptions will have on your plan. Utilize multidimensional analysis tools to view budgeting and planning data. With Best! Imperativ Active Planner, you'll be able to analyze data that is organized according to business drivers and variables (such as region, product, customer, etc.). Values are extracted directly from Plan Sheets to multidimensional OLAP cubes, where you can slice and dice important data with easy click and drag techniques and write-back changes to the Plan Sheet. Perform what-if analysis. Easily reorganize budget structures, including planning assumptions and variable drivers so you can view the impact of potential changes to your plan. This enables you to make more effective and predictive management decisions. Compare actuals to budgets for greater fiscal accountability. Best! Imperativ Active Planner provides the ability to compare actuals to budgets on an ongoing basis. For example, if the plan is developed based on products by customer by salesperson, you can compare and analyze actual, plan and variance values in an OLAP cube. With quick and easy data management and analysis, you'll increase your organization's fiscal awareness and accountability. Make critical business decisions quickly based on results of multidimensional analysis. Best! Imperativ Active Planner can be used to analyze individual Plan Sheets and entire plans with multidimensional and data visualization tools. Extract important data and create relationships between data points to illustrate patterns, trends and exceptions that indicate how your business is doing - and where it is going.   Comprehensive and Powerful Calculation Techniques Using a comprehensive calculation engine to retrieve values for budgeting, planning and analysis, Best! Imperativ Active Planner enables you to link key business drivers to the budget, spread costs or revenue targets over defined periods of time and model seasonal trends. Create an unlimited number of formulas and formula lines. Use formulas to annualize sales for the last quarter for a fast growing company, derive account values as a percentage of previous year's sales, compute average daily balance of debt for and interest calculation, or use database queries to retrieve enterprise-wide information. Flexible spreading techniques. With Best! Imperativ Active Planner, you'll be able to apply calculations to a group of columns and spread back to individual periods using factors such as seasonal trends (evenly spread), business drivers (user-defined spread) and prior year balances (historical year averaging spread). Track up to 6 period balances. You'll be able to track fixed or relative period ranges; up to 11 years; actual, budget or statistical balances; beginning, change, ending or average daily balances; computations; any accounts or ranges of accounts; and multi-company. Define global and local formulas. Global formulas can be used by anyone in the system, eliminating the need for users to rekey standard formulas. Local formulas can be created for and attached to a specific plan.   Best! Imperativ Allocations Today's organizations must efficiently deploy resources and carefully monitor costs to compete in their markets. Best! Imperativ Allocations, a member of the Best! Imperativ Analytics family of products, provides a flexible tool to structure virtually any allocation to accurately measure resource consumption. With Best! Imperativ Allocations, you will: streamline period end processing accurately measure resource consumption prevent errors with built-in processing controls Best! Imperativ Allocations allows you to: create virtually any type of allocation transaction; distribute allocations in a variety of ways; redistribute individual transactions; and create accrual transactions.   Streamline Period End Processing All organizations strive to shorten period end closing cycles. With Best! Imperativ Allocations, you can create virtually any type of allocation transaction, distribute allocations in a variety of ways, redistribute individual transactions, and create accrual transactions. Accurately measure resource consumption using individualized basis calculations. For example, a single allocation source such as operating costs can have allocations based on sales, head count, and square footage. For simple fixed-percentage allocations, you can enter a specific value. Create virtually any allocation transaction consisting of multiple source, recipient and offset accounts. Any account or group of accounts can be allocated to one or more accounts, with full control over the accounts used in the transaction. Complete transaction generator capabilities for automating - entries made in the course of the normal accounting cycle. Redistribute individual transactions easily. For example, advertising expense transactions can be allocated to individual stores based on revenue, with the original source information. Create non-ledger based allocations. For example, activity-based allocations and two-stage allocations can be created and exported easily into the transaction system.   Flexible Calculations Formulas are at the core of Best! Imperativ Allocations. They are used to calculate the basis for an allocation, source pools, journal transaction amounts and much more. Use formulas to calculate a variety of allocations. For example, you can use formulas to calculate the basis of an allocation, compute journal transaction amounts such as interest based on the average daily balance of debt, or calculate the source pool of general and administrative expenses. Define global and local formulas. Global formulas can be used by anyone in the system, eliminating the need for users to re-key standard formulas. Local formulas can be created for and attached to a specific allocation. Create an unlimited number of formulas and formula lines. Each formula line in Best! Imperativ Allocations can incorporate account balances, fixed amounts, database queries and Plan Sheet values from Best! Imperativ Active Planner. Use database queries in formulas to calculate and deploy values from other databases. Values can be retrieved from many sources, including Access, Dbase, Excel, FoxPro, SQL Server and any ODBC or OLE DB compliant database.   Control Processing and Establish Allocation Dependencies Best! Imperativ Allocations can group allocations into batches either for expediency or to control the processing sequence, providing you with timely and efficient allocation and accrual processing. Tier transactions in any order to control the transaction processing sequence. Incorporate data from and create transactions for multiple companies using formulas or inter-company transactions. Prevent errors with built-in processing controls. Best! Imperativ Allocations processing controls allow you to do the following: Run individual allocations and allocation batches in specific periods Select effective dates to restrict the lifecycle of a particular allocation Choose to process allocations only if not previously processed or posted Flag processed allocations as pending until posted or canceled View an audit trail   Comprehensive, Flexible Reporting for Enterprise-Wide Performance Measurement With Best! Imperativ Financial Reporter, you can easily create comprehensive financial and operational reports containing key business metrics. As a core component of Best! Imperativ Analytics, Best! Imperativ Financial Reporter is designed to work hand-in-hand with both Best! Imperativ Active Planner and Best! Imperativ Allocations -- in addition to your general ledger and other enterprise data. Our innovative application combines the reliability of utilizing multiple, enterprise-wide data sources with the diversity of a user-friendly Report Creation Wizard. Forget the complexity of other financial reporting applications, Best! Imperativ Financial Reporter guides you through an unlimited number of report views, styles, and layouts to tackle sophisticated reports swiftly and confidently. Imagine real-time, enterprise-wide data at your fingertips! Our powerful, purpose-built software offers: Quick links to multiple data sources Complete control over report design for custom analysis Rapid report distribution using your existing e-mail Easy "drill-down" into all supporting data. Best! Imperativ Financial Reporter will drastically reduce your cumbersome reporting process to a seamless, productive experience. Comprehensive reporting means timely, sound decisions for your company -- making Best! Imperativ Financial Reporter the only choice for your financial reporting needs.   Prepare And Analyze Complex Financial and Operational Reports With Ease Step away from lengthy, clumsy reporting processes and capitalize on the speed and power of total system integration. The increased accuracy and flexibility provided by Best! Imperativ Financial Reporter translates into better comparisons of key data, rendering a precise analysis of most any aspect of your company. Best! Imperativ Financial Reporter lets you quickly and easily create reports that encompass the information your management teams need to fully understand your business and plan for the future. Best! Imperativ Financial Reporter offers the ability to: Easily report on all planning data located in Best! Imperativ Active Planner View pending allocations from Best! Imperativ Allocations Report on data from your General Ledger, inventory system, sales databases, HR and Payroll systems, or other enterprise sources Create sophisticated reports with ease using the Report Creation Wizard Preview reports as they are designed Rapidly "drill-down" to view all supporting data View reports from various business levels with the click of a button E-mail reports quickly for fast, easy distribution Never again will your executives rifle through hundreds of pages searching for the information they need. Best! Imperativ Financial Reporter -- the comprehensive, flexible reporting application for enterprise-wide performance measurement.

 

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