THE BOTTOM LINE

IBM Cognos FSR is used by finance departments to automate the creation and validation of a variety of financial reports, including disclosures compatible with regulators’ new XBRL tagging requirements. By accessing and extracting accounting data from a variety of data sources, the application also enables finance departments to create assets such as management reports and briefing books. Companies using these capabilities were recently examined by Nucleus analysts, who identified benefits including improved productivity for finance staff, the ability to adopt analytics techniques that improve operating results, and better alignment between organizational goals and guidance given to investors by the finance department.