IBM Cognos Controller

Cognos 8 Business Intelligence is a powerful BI tool based on a single service oriented architecture (SOA) to support companies with their Reporting, Analysis, Dashbords, and Scorecarding needs.

Reporting

With the release of Cognos Controller 8, companies are now being offered a superior product to help them manage their close, consolidation, and financial reporting processes. With this application, companies can setup automated data links from their general ledger systems, and consolidate them into a single financial statement view based on a unified Chart of Accounts. During this ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) process, Cognos Controller can gather data based on pre-defined dimensions such as departments, profit centers, regions, etc. and provide you with greater analytical capabilities of your data.

What makes Controller so intriguing is its ease of use without a sacrifice in functionality. This software can be defined to support companies with multiple currency translations, inter-company eliminations, and investment eliminations. Tasks that normally take weeks to complete will now take days. Included with this functionality is the ability to setup automatic account reconciliations and a real-time status of your close process, thus removing the guesswork of tasks left outstanding.

All configurations setup in Controller are transparent to the end users which is essential for compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley and ICFR audits. Audit logs can be configured to recorded transactions, journal entries can be configured to require management approval, and security can be setup to limit user's access to only data that is necessary to complete their job responsibilities.

For those companies already invested or looking to invest in a Cognos Planning or Cognos BI platform, Cognos Controller 8 is setup to integrate seamlessly with these applications. Cognos Controller can be setup to feed data directly to your BI cubes, leveraging the powerful reporting functionality of BI. For those companies not running Cognos BI, Cognos Controller is still a viable standalone solution with over 200 standard reports containing built in reporting functionality to meet your financial reporting requirements.