Ensuring Financial Data Quality and Trust with OneStream

Introduction: Why Financial Data Quality Matters

Today's CFOs and controllers need to manage their critical, enterprise-wide financial data and processes as effectively as possible. That data needs to be timely, accurate, and easily accessible for insightful reporting and analysis to maintain a competitive edge. Accordingly, their corporate performance management (CPM) solutions need to be robust, scalable, and provide full integration with their ERP, HCM, CRM, and other systems.

OneStream provides market-leading data-integration and data-quality capabilities built into the platform, with seamless connections to more than 250+ unique GL/ERP systems, on-premise or in the cloud. This includes full integration with SAP, PLeX, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, NetSuite, Infor, and others, using a direct-connect framework and no-code connectors, where direct integrations are completed in days and weeks vs. months. The OneStream platform incorporates all industry-standard integration capabilities, including ODBC, RESTful and SOAP web service APIs, and custom third-party communication tools.

With full visibility from source to report, all financial data is clearly visible and easily accessible. Financial processes can be automated, reports are more accurate, and the enterprise can utilize its core financial and operational data using a single interface. With full integration to ERPs and other systems, the enterprise can simplify business processes, reduce errors and inefficiencies, and allow its teams to focus on their work vs. managing data-integration challenges.

Data Integration Requirements in CPM

Data integration is one of the most critical aspects of implementing CPM solutions. Why? Because the effectiveness of your budgeting, planning, consolidation, and reporting processes is fully dependent on getting timely and accurate data from GL/ERP, HCM, CRM, and other systems.

Common Use Cases for Data Integration in CPM

• Loading GL trial balances for financial consolidation and reporting
• Loading detailed capital asset data from ERP systems for capital planning
• Drilling back to transaction details for budget vs. actuals variance analysis
• Loading project data from ERP and project-management systems
• Loading supplemental data for financial reporting, budgeting, or tax provision
• Loading customer and prospect data from CRM systems for sales forecasting
• Loading detailed employee data from HCM systems for workforce planning
• Loading prior-period actuals to seed the budget process, or year-to-date actuals to support rolling forecasts

Most CPM applications rely on separate tools to provide integration, along with file-based integration with source systems — but key advantages come with built-in, full, direct integration between CPM and GL/ERP and other systems. A lack of robust data integration capabilities creates a multitude of problems, including manual steps, wasted resources and time, risk of errors, poor financial data quality, and a lack of traceability and auditability.

OneStream's Data Integration Capabilities

The OneStream platform is a market-leading CPM solution. It unifies and simplifies financial consolidation, close, financial and operational planning, reporting, analytics, and financial data quality for sophisticated organizations.

OneStream's unified platform enables organizations to modernize Finance, replace multiple legacy applications and cloud-based point solutions, and reduce the total cost of ownership of financial systems. What does that mean for Finance teams? It means OneStream unleashes them to spend less time on data integration and system maintenance — and more time focused on driving business performance.

Types of Data OneStream Integrates

OneStream's data-integration capabilities span many different types of data, including the following:

• Trial balance summaries
• Statistical / non-financial data
• Operational data
• Transaction detail
• Employees, jobs, and positions
• Leads and opportunities
• Users and user security
• Chart of accounts
• Dimensional hierarchies
• Operational metrics
• Currency rates and more

How Data Gets Into OneStream

Data can be integrated into OneStream via several methods. The most popular — and most powerful — is the "Direct Connect" approach and no-code connectors like the SAP Connector, which enable OneStream to connect directly to source systems, load the data into OneStream, and drill back to transaction-system details. In addition to Direct Connect, file-based sources can be loaded from spreadsheets compiled by contributors, delimited files from sources without an open interface, or third-party data to enrich the analysis or driver calculation. These data files can be loaded through the interface as part of a workflow and included in the data-validation sequence.

Integrated Financial Data Quality Management

The loading, mapping, and transforming of data from source systems to CPM solutions can be cumbersome and fragmented without highly connected, business-user-managed capabilities. Data movement may be reliant on IT resources that aren't knowledgeable about the CPM model and the transformation and validations that must occur — even more problematic without the transparency and controls the business needs to support compliance. OneStream lets you avoid these issues.

OneStream has strong foundations in data quality that allow for unparalleled flexibility and visibility into the data-loading and integration process. OneStream's financial data quality is not a module or separate product, but part of the core OneStream platform — providing strict controls to deliver confidence and reliability in the quality of your data. Data-quality risk is managed using a fully auditable system; integration maps and validations control submissions from remote sites. Data may be loaded via direct connections to source databases or via any file format, and audit reports can be filtered based on materiality thresholds — ensuring one-time review at the appropriate points in the process.

Key Features of Integrated Financial Data Quality

Below are some key features of OneStream's integrated financial data quality:

• Ability to read any GL trial balance file or report in any format with no manipulation
• Bi-directional status updates of data collection and model changes
• Direct integration for any open ERP or data source
• Email or text error alerts
• Pre-consolidation mapping and intersection validation
• Complete audit trails from 10-K/10-Q
• Drill-back to source GL or ERP data
• Post-consolidation validation and confirmation
• Ability to manage the close by requiring completeness and accuracy
• Drill-down from calculated and aggregated accounts
• Phased submissions

OneStream Direct Connect

OneStream can connect to and import data from any external system through a direct database connection. This means data can be imported and processed all the way through the workflow certification process — without ever having to use a source-system extract file. OneStream Integration Connectors offer direct integration with any open GL/ERP or other source system.

Below are a few of the main advantages of the Direct Connect approach:

• Delivers fast and efficient direct-to-source system integration processes
• Drill-down and drill-back to transactional details, including journal entries
• Delivers direct integration with available drill-back built for any open ERP, including Oracle, PeopleSoft, JDE, SAP, Infor, Microsoft® AX/Dynamics, and more

OneStream's Direct Connect feature uses Connector Business Rules to generate and execute queries against source tables or views, pulling data into the OneStream Stage engine for mapping and transformation. Connectors can also be configured to call exposed web services from source systems using SOAP or REST APIs, and a no-code connector is available for SAP. Once data has been loaded into the OneStream Stage, it can be mapped, transformed, and summarized for loading to the financial model — and the data in Stage remains, providing drill-down capabilities from any number on a report, dashboard, or screen to review the mapping and transformation that was applied to the sourced data.

Drill-back to source paths combine the user's current point of view — such as account, entity, product, or other known attributes about the data point — to request detailed data from the data source. That data could be transactional events that made up the period-end balance, an invoice image, or other source data that was never loaded into the CPM solution.

Conclusion

Effective data integration is a critical component of any successful CPM implementation — ensuring the timeliness and accuracy of financial and operational data used for financial reporting, planning, and forecasting. OneStream provides a market-leading CPM platform with powerful, integrated financial data quality and integration capabilities.

Ultimately, through advanced data integration, drill-down and drill-back, mapping, and process-controls functionality, OneStream delivers the most complete financial data quality capabilities in the CPM market. As a result, financial data quality, consolidations, and budgeting work as a team to ensure that all the data is timely and accurate. OneStream takes data integration to a new level thanks to the benefits below:

• Simplifies data collection, consolidation, and certification
• Improves confidence in the quality of financial results
• Reduces costs of compliance, internal controls, and audit requirements
• Provides consistency and accuracy with complete transparency