BI Solution - SAS® Financial Management for Civilian Government

Business Intelligence BI Software : SAS® Financial Management for Civilian Government

Current legislation and executive mandates underscore the need for better financial management systems in the federal sector. Recent accounting discrepancies at Fortune 500 companies have eroded trust and increased public awareness. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act mandates that publicly traded companies have transparency in their financial reporting. Similarly, constituents demand fair value for their tax dollar, and federal agencies must also be able to generate accurate financial reports in a timely manner. The pressure is intense.

SAS Financial Management can help agencies bring together financial information from a variety of systems across the enterprise, yielding comprehensive results that are on time and "on the money." Our solution integrates data management and financial intelligence with the finest online analytical processing in the industry, allowing you to view your organization from any perspective: bureau, agency, geographic site or other category.

With SAS, federal executives can fully integrate financial management into the agency's strategic planning, budgeting and mission evaluation processes, producing a clear statement of financial management goals and objectives. As part of a total approach to performance management, SAS gives organizations the power to monitor, analyze and report on financial information ... and use the information to drive strategic decisions and manage financial risk.

SAS Financial Management improves the accuracy, relevance and timeliness of financial plans, budgets and reports while promoting the alignment and execution of strategy. This solution uses the integrity, analytic power and scalability of the SAS Intelligence Platform to facilitate flexible, strategic financial and operational planning within a collaborative environment – across the entire enterprise. Using SAS Financial Management, organizations can more effectively analyze and manage the true drivers of stakeholder value in relation to strategy in real time.

SAS Financial Management includes two integrated functional components:

• Planning – allows finance executives and other key finance department personnel to embed advanced SAS analytics into budgets and plans for more accurate forecasting of future operating results.
• Financial reporting – provides the unique capability to consolidate multidimensional information on demand while performing all financial calculations relevant to the reporting and planning processes, thereby enabling organizations to close their books more rapidly.

Using these powerful components, departments and agencies will be able to:

• Create more frequent, accurate forecasts. SAS Financial Management allows an organization to create plans and forecasts which can easily be updated in response to changing business and operational circumstances. As a result, forecasted earnings expectations can be released with greater confidence, and the continuous process of managing strategy execution is enabled and shared across the enterprise.
• Ensure financial transparency. SAS Financial Management provides a transparent environment for managing financial and operational data in order to produce timely, accurate and relevant reports. This transparency is achieved by extending control of information horizontally across the enterprise and vertically between transaction-oriented systems and the higher-level financial management system.
• Publish reports more quickly. Because of the growing need to publish accurate reports more quickly, SAS Financial Management significantly reduces the time required to produce and publish financial reports. On-demand consolidations, which simultaneously incorporate any necessary currency conversion, eliminations, ownership adjustments and allocations, can reduce the time and cost necessary for financial consolidations.

SAS Financial Management works hand-in-hand with other SAS solutions, combining information about strategic performance management – from areas ranging from financial performance to customer and supplier relationship management to workforce planning and analytics. Agencies can add capabilities for financial statistical forecasting. If activity-based costing/management is what you are looking for, you can now also integrate with the highly acclaimed SAS Activity-Based Management for high-powered costing and planning analytics.

Source: Business intelligence BI software, SAS BI solutions for government at sas.com