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AIA

Financial Driver lets you plan and budget in the Cloud

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22nd Feb 2012
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A relative newcomer to the business intelligence software scene is taking on industry giants like IBM, SAP and Oracle by offering a web-based planning and budgeting tool that undercuts the traditional pricing model for such systems.

Michael Coveney, a former executive with Comshare (now part of Infor), has first-hand experience of six-figure planning and budgeting systems, but joined Financial Driver  because he saw the potential for the “straightforward” planning and budgeting tool to carve out a niche in previously untapped markets.

“Financial Driver is perfect for organisations using spreadsheets,” he told AccountingWEB. “Usually when you  move away from Excel, it means going to online analytical processing (OLAP), which requires a huge investment.

“What Financial Driver has done is create a really simple model with a fixed number of business dimensions: accounts, time, structure, version and one other, say for products.

“For anyone coming from a spreadsheet environment, it only takes 5-6hrs to pick up.

“What sets it apart is that it’s hosted service in the Cloud. So you can email out links to the main database, and people can enter their data via the web. As soon as it’s in there, the data is available for consolidation and reporting. It doesn’t require you to understand the technology.”

For budgeting, the system is designed for manual data entry, but for actuals the Financial Driver can extract a trial balance from most accounting systems; once the accounts are mapped into schedules within Financial Driver, future imports can be fed straight in, Coveneny explained.

For reporting, the database consolidates the information entered into a spreadsheet-like data cube. “It’s basically replacing spreadsheets as the mechanism for collecting and consolidating data,” Coveney said.

That element of the product is widely accepted as good industry practice, but when it comes to pricing, Financial Driver gets a little more radical. There is no upfront cost, Coveney explained. All there is to pay is a monthly rental cost starting from £35 a month per user for small organisations. Discounts apply once you get beyond 10-15users and a 200-user organisation would pay around £100 a year per user.

“We kept the costs very simple. You just pay for what you use,” Coveney added. “We reckon our price is less than any organisation using the big boys will be paying on the maintenance for their system.”

UK fashion brand Ted Baker has adopted the system for both statutory and management reporting purposes. The system also helped to simplify budgeting and helped reduced the annual cycle from 16 down to 10 weeks. Head of finance Charles Anderson commented: “We’re able to more quickly model changes to our product lines, stores, territories, staffing or supplier base and so help the business make more timely, accurate decisions.

“Finance is now at the heart of all the strategic decisions that define the overall direction of the business.”

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