Cognos Lauches BI Tools For Financial Reporting And Compliance

In addition, the Canadian company partnered with consulting firm Deloitte Inc. in developing a new financial reporting tool, called the Close, Consolidate and Report Performance Blueprint.

The new tools, part of the company's line of Performance Blueprint products, run on Cognos 8 business intelligence and reporting engines.

The Management and Financial Reporting Blueprint includes a pre-built library of configurable performance reports to help simplify deployment. The product is designed to help make the financial consolidation process more efficient and to provide quicker distribution of performance reports to business managers.

The second product, called the International Financial Reporting Standards Performance Blueprint, assembles the collective best-practices of Cognos customers across Europe to provide generic, predefined structures that comply with EC regulations and cover the management of financial statements, including income statements, balance sheets and statements of changes in equity, cash flow and explanatory notes.

The CCR Blueprint developed with Deloitte is powered by the Cognos 8 Controller reporting engine. The product maps each step in the financial close to a financial control activity, providing a complete view of the financial close cycle to help improve data integrity, shorten the cycle and reduce compliance costs, Cognos officials said.

CCR Blueprint uses 30 financial control objectives developed by Deloitte and based on the framework established by the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission, a private sector initiative to improve financial reporting.