By Scott Stern   September 4, 2019

Did you know, according to EY[1], 50% of finance leaders say the current function cannot meet the demands of strategic priorities? For most, stats like EY's are hard to believe. Especially when you consider all the buzz about machine learning, advanced analytics and finance transformation. And it's even harder to believe when you consider the billions of dollars that CFO's have invested into legacy corporate performance management systems (CPM 1.0). I mean, weren't these tools designed to streamline financial processes like the financial close, planning and reporting?



The problem is that for sophisticated organizations – legacy CPM tools can debilitate finance teams. Why? Because legacy CPM tools from Oracle Hyperion and SAP are fragmented in nature. And these so-called product suites include many different standalone applications and tools for processes such as financial consolidation, reporting, budgeting, planning, forecasting and other processes. And what happens if your business needs evolve and you want to add capabilities for workforce planning, capital planning, sales planning, account reconciliations or the tax provision? You guessed it. Your forced to buy, implement and maintain even more software – driving up your total cost of ownership and adding complexity to your financial processes.

Why does this matter? It matters because rather than spending time analyzing the business, it's your teams that are left moving and reconciling data and managing non value-added processes that have nothing to do with managing the business.

Unified Platform and Solutions MarketPlace for Finance

But there's good news. And with over 350 successful customers around the globe, OneStream (see figure 1) is quickly becoming the proven alternative to legacy CPM solutions, Excel spreadsheets and cloud-based planning tools. Here's why so many organizations are making the move.

Figure 1: The OneStream XF Platform

OneStream modernizes and simplifies financial consolidation, planning, reporting, analytics and financial data quality through a single, unified application. How is this different from other tools? Because like the iPhone, OneStream is an extensible platform that provides out of the box support for core processes such as financial close and consolidation or planning, budgeting and forecasting and can be extended to address additional requirements without adding complexity.. Why does this matter? Well, first, finance leaders don't want to have to purchase, train on and integrate new software or implement another version of their existing software every time their business needs evolve. Second, actuals, plans and forecasts live together in the same application for easy comparisons. That means finance leaders can leverage the platform to focus on driving the business rather than spending time moving and reconciling data.

And there's more. OneStream's platform can easily be extended with solutions from the OneStream MarketPlace.

Just like users can download apps from the Apple App Store, these downloadable solutions are optimized for the OneStream platform, allowing customers to easily extend the value of their CPM platform to meet the changing needs of finance and operations. And with more than 50 solutions (and growing) for customers to download, configure and deploy, OneStream is continually thinking about the evolving needs of modern finance leaders and their business partners.

Let's dive into a few examples.

Enabling Business Partnerships with Specialty Planning Solutions

How do you manage the planning process with your sales, HR and operations teams? And as you finalize your Q4-FY2019 forecast and begin FY2020 planning, are you able to create detailed, driver-based plans that are dynamically aligned to financial plans and goals?

If not, then you'll definitely want to check out the XF MarketPlace's Planning solutions. These solutions enable finance leaders to create plans in the language of the business, which is what your business partners are held accountable to.

  • With Sales Planning, finance and sales leaders can create plans tailored to customer opportunity, region or even the sales rep level.
  • People planning enables leaders in HR or the lines of business to project the cost of new and existing labor needs.
  • Capital planning lets operations leaders take accountability to plan for their respective capital projects and understand the impact to the income statement, balance sheet and cash flow.

And once those plans are complete, there are additional solutions to help simplify processes within the financial close.

Close and Reporting Solutions

With purpose-built solutions for the back-office, accounting teams can extend their OneStream solution across additional financial close processes. A few examples of the available solutions are included below:

  • Close Manager – Provides visibility into all changes and key financial close statistics to maintain maximum control and transparency during the close cycle.
  • Account Reconciliations – Eliminates manual or standalone reconciliation solutions. Reconciles what's reported and drill-to-reconciliations with a single source platform for all GL trial balances.
  • Tax Provision – Aligns tax provisioning with financial reporting for consistency of data and reporting. Eliminates spreadsheet risk while increasing transparency.

Finally, once the planning and financial close processes are complete, users can add additional solutions to drive productivity and increase the return on their OneStream investment.

Save Time with Productivity Solutions

With the Parcel Service from the XF MarketPlace, users can create report books and distribute documents by creating document packages that can be shipped (or emailed or copied to a file share/portal) based on a pre-defined distribution setting.

If you'd rather enable users to build their own reports, download Guided Reporting from the XF MarketPlace. This popular solution provides business users with an easy-to-use report-viewing experience that integrates financial and operating results all within the same report.

Interested in something else? Be sure to check out the additional productivity solutions you can download, configure and deploy in minutes.

Increase ROI with the XF MarketPlace

With the first and only unified platform for the office of finance, OneStream enables organizations to modernize finance, replace multiple legacy applications and reduce the total cost of ownership of financial systems.

But what's most unique about OneStream is that it's designed to address the needs of modern finance leaders. Leaders who must have a seamless view of the business AND the insights to help organizations make better decisions. Sophisticated leaders don't manage their organizations in fragments. And they certainly don't want to rely on legacy CPM software that forces them to buy more software every time their business needs evolve.

After all, isn't the role of modern enterprise software to enable the business, no matter how wild the ride?

Learn More

Download our latest eBook to learn how OneStream and the XF MarketPlace deliver rapid ROI for modern finance leaders and their business partners.

[1]E&Y "The Disruption of CFO's DNA"