The Results of Combining Operational Models with Financial Budgets

This is the final blog entry in a 3 part series on combining financial & operational models to link key business drivers to budgets & forecasts. Click here to review part 2 or part 1 respectively.

Combining operational models that link key business drivers with your financial budgets provide the following results:

• Significantly shorter budget/forecast cycles
• Facilitates market environment vs. calendar driven re-forecasting to react to quickly to changes
• Re-aligns financial planning focus
• Facilitates insight between operational tactics and the financial forecast
• Facilitates variance analysis at the operational and key driver level
• Shifts professional resource time from collecting data and maintaining spreadsheets to analysis and decision making

Please browse this autodemo for an overview of Prophix CPM, a solution that can facilitate sophisticated operational modelling.

MR Translations - FRx vs MR

Management Reporter's financial translations feature is completely different from FRx's functionality, which is a welcome improvement!

The highlights of FRx's functionality was that you had to:

1. Re-enter your average, spot and historical rates in FRx's DAX tables (since it couldn't pull this information from your Dynamics ERP), and
2. Have a number of settings correct in FRx (i.e. company currency, report catalogue translations feature, translations activated in the column and the column syntax correct). 

The beauty of the translations feature in MR is that it leverages the Dynamics ERP exchange rate information.  In Dynamics GP, it specifically references a default exchange table.  So, in most cases, a client can have two exchange tables (i.e. monthly average, and spot/historical) used for multiple purposes including: calculating exchange at time of transaction, revaluing foreign currency transactions and financial translations. Next, you have to set the translation setting for each account in your ERP.

Once this is complete, there is only one step to perform in Management Reporter to produce a translated financial statement, namely, ensure that you have a column with the Currency Source set to the translated currency.  In the sample below, the functional currency is USD and the translated currency is CAD:



MR Column Translating USD to CAD

This is what the final report looks like:

Sample MR Translated Report

I must say, this functionality is a great improvement and much more efficient than what was provided in FRx.  Enjoy!