Demo Blog

Software Increases Productivity in the Record-to-Report Cycle

Posted by Robert Kugel on 29 May 2025

The six costliest words in managing a finance department are, “We’ve always done it this way.” The record-to-report (R2R) cycle describes the process of finalizing and summarizing the financial activities of a business for a specific accounting period—typically a month, quarter or fiscal year. It is important to note that R2R exclusively covers the activities between recording (keeping the books)...

Topics: Office of Finance, ERP and Continuous Accounting, digital finance, Generative AI, Consolidate and Close Management, AI and Machine Learning

Oracle Fusion Financials: Boring is Cool

Posted by Robert Kugel on 16 October 2012

There weren’t any headlines (or even many tweets) about Oracle Fusion Financials emanating from this year’s Oracle OpenWorld (#OOW12) conference. Maybe that’s by design, because it’s not in Oracle’s best interest to kick up a lot of dust about ERP migration. The financial applications software market is mature, and market share leaders such as Oracle have less interest in getting customers to...

Topics: Performance Management, ERP, Office of Finance, financial, Business Performance, Cloud Computing, Financial Performance, Oracle, Workday, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft

Financial Institutions Need Dynamic Risk Management

Posted by Robert Kugel on 19 July 2012

Planning portfolio risk follows the same basic tenets as other sorts of business planning. It must be done in the context of a time dimension. In business, short-term plans are developed with a lot of givens or constraints. For example, capacities are fixed, because it’s impossible to wave a magic wand and bring a new factory on line, stuff more machine tools into already jammed facilities or...

Topics: Sales Performance, Governance, GRC, Office of Finance, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Analytics, Business Performance, Financial Performance, Information Management, Business Planning, Risk, Risk & Compliance (GRC)

Cognos Express Gives Midsize Companies Outsize Capabilities

Posted by Robert Kugel on 08 June 2012

A main reason why desktop spreadsheets are pervasive in midsize companies (which we define as those with 100 to 1,000 employees) is that these organizations do not have the financial and manpower resources to implement and maintain traditional enterprise business intelligence and performance management systems. To address this gap in the market, several years ago IBM Cognos launched Express, a...

Topics: ERP, Office of Finance, Reporting, Budgeting, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Dashboards, IBM, Uncategorized, CFO, finance, Financial Performance Management

What’s the Rush in Adopting IFRS?

Posted by Robert Kugel on 25 May 2012

I have commented before on the movement to adopt International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) by the United States to replace US-GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles). Most recently I discussed the drive toharmonize the significant differences between US-GAAP and IFRS on revenue recognition and lease accounting. To those who are interested in but not intimately involved with the...

Topics: Reporting, audit, Consolidation, IFRS, US-GAAP accounting, XBRL, Business Analytics, Business Collaboration, Business Performance, Financial Performance, Financial Management, financial standards, FPM

BizNet Enables Enterprise Spreadsheet-Based Reporting

Posted by Robert Kugel on 19 April 2012

I’ve been advocating more intelligent use of spreadsheets for the better part of a decade. Ventana Research coined the term “enterprise spreadsheet” in 2004 to describe software applications that marry a Microsoft Excel user interface with a business rules server and a relational or multidimensional data store. This approach offers the best of both worlds in the sense of taking advantage of...

Topics: Planning, Sales Performance, Social Media, Supply Chain Performance, Sustainability, Governance, Reporting, Budgeting, IT Performance, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Analytics, Business Collaboration, Business Intelligence, Business Mobility, Business Performance, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Financial Performance, Information Applications, Information Management, Workforce Performance, Data, Risk & Compliance (GRC), Financial Performance Management, Microsoft Excel, Spreadsheets

Risk Analytics Has Benefits for Optimizing Performance

Posted by Robert Kugel on 16 November 2011

Risk has always been an integral part of business, but dealing effectively with risk is a progression. Indeed, history shows businesses adapting and coping better with risk through innovation. The importance of using information technology to manage risk is growing because today’s systems can automatically measure and analyze a much broader set of risk factors than individuals can, and do so more...

Topics: Sales Performance, Governance, GRC, Office of Finance, Reporting, balanced scorecard, enterprise risk management, KRI, Operational Performance, Business Analytics, Business Performance, Financial Performance, Risk

Corporations Must Manage Taxes More Intelligently

Posted by Robert Kugel on 28 November 2010

For the past couple of years I’ve been asserting that most larger companies (those with 1,000 or employees) need to adopt a new approach to using software to handle their taxes comprehensively, both the direct sort (income taxes) and the indirect variety (sales and use taxes as well as value-added or goods and services taxes). This is a necessary response to an emerging challenge from more...

Topics: Office of Finance, Enterprise Tax, Tax Software, Business Performance, Financial Performance, CFO, Corporate Finance, Financial Performance Management, International Finance