Finance Reporting & Analysis Solutions

Financial Analysis refers to the assessment of a business to deal with the planning, budgeting, monitoring, forecasting, and improving of all financial details within an organization.

Understand, Identify, Analyze and Adjust

Understanding your organization's financial health is a fundamental aspect of responding to today's increasingly stringent financial reporting requirements. To avoid risks, organizations must quickly

• identify ascertain financial ratios and trends acrossin liabilities and assets
• analyze and adjust planned and forecasted amounts
• act to provide regulatory statements as needed

Financial Analysis applications built on the MicroStrategy platform make these activities easier and more efficient.

Business intelligence applications within the Financial Analysis application area include:

• Budgeting and Budget Analysis
• Financial Performance Management
• Revenue Analysis
• Cost Analysis
• Expense Analysis
• Cash Flow Analysis
• Balance Sheet Analysis
• Accounts Receivable Analysis
• Accounts Payable Analysis
• Invoicing and Billing Analysis
• Profit and Loss Statements

Financial Analysis with MicroStrategy

The unique strengths of the MicroStrategy platform are well suited for performing even the most demanding of Financial Analysis applications. Using MicroStrategy, Financial users have their detailed reporting, their scorecard of metrics, and their interactive dashboards at their fingertips via a single interface. From Profit Margin or Current Ratio to Asset Turnover or Debt to Equity, users have unlimited access to financial ratios and analytics when performing financial analysis with any MicroStrategy reporting tool.

The MicroStrategy platform offers analytics that can be used to answer key financial questions:

• What is the aging distribution of Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable?
• Are there any customers with payment problems; if so, who needs to be notified?
• What are the values of assets and liabilities on a given date?
• What is the value of assets, liabilities, and owners' equity on a given date?
• What is the breakdown of expenses by business units?
• Which business units are hitting their targets?
• What are the revenue trends by business units?
• What are the trends in revenue, by revenue types?
• What is the forecasted revenue? Has this forecast changed? Why have revenue forecasts changed?
• What is the actual amount of profit margin by business unit or region? What are the associated trends?
• What is the breakdown of costs by vendors, and what are the associated trends?
• What is the change in cash position from period to period?
• Which bills are due this week and for what amounts?

Companies rely on business intelligence to provide visibility into the full scope of their business and financial operations. As corporate financial data faces greater scrutiny, finance and accounting departments must make detailed information more quickly and widely available. Business intelligence uniquely provides efficient transparency, analysis and delivery of corporate financial data.

Finance and accounting departments across every industry are increasingly leveraging business intelligence to analyze sources of revenue and cost, view data underlying the statement of cash flows and compare planned and actual revenue and expenses. Companies must satisfy public accounting requirements for government organizations and shareholders, as well as deliver financial data to financial analysts, business unit management, executives and directors.

Finance Reporting & Analysis Areas
Balance Sheet Reporting & Analysis	Accounts Receivable/Accounts Payable Reporting & Analysis
Profit & Loss/Income Statement Analysis	Financial Budgeting & Forecasting
Cash Flow Analysis	Risk Management

Achieving Financial Transparency

Can your financial reporting stand up to the new requirements imposed by the Sarbanes - Oxley Act -- higher penalties, higher risks, greater precision -- with much less time to accomplish it?

Studies have shown that over 60% of CFOs believe that their existing financial applications are inadequate. These applications are fine for recording accounting transactions, budgeting and planning; however, they lack the ability to deliver comprehensive, live, transaction-level financial reporting with automatic fraud detection and proactive alerting.

MicroStrategy's technology has helped its customers achieve full transparency into their financial data. The MicroStrategy platform is optimized to help companies deploy flexible reporting, free-form investigation and automatic anomaly detection allowing businesses to file statutory reports with the utmost confidence, precision and accuracy.

MicroStrategy delivers five best practices for financial transparency:

Extensive Data Gathering	Environment for standardization of data and library of reports
Broad Data Visibility	Deployment to hundreds and thousands of users with full security
Vigilant Fraud Detection	Automatic fraud detection through scouring of database
Material Spotlight	Timely and thorough identification of material elements
Live Reports	Drilling across time for trending and down to transaction detail for complete analysis

Business Benefits

With MicroStrategy, your business can:

• support a consolidated view of financial data coming from multiple ERPs, spreadsheets and other planning systems;
• deliver statutory GAAP-compliant reports replacing manual consolidations;
• investigate financial data more thoroughly by drilling down to transaction-level detail from high-level reports;
• provide hundreds and thousands of authorized users with the highest levels of data security;
• automatically detect anomalies and variances in the financial data; and
• proactively deliver important information to the authorities.