Kaitlin Suggs
Hello and welcome to our product demo on financial planning and analysis in CCH Tagetik. We'll be exploring how CCH Tagetik empowers organizations with AI-driven financial planning and analysis that enhances strategic decision-making for better business outcomes. If you have any questions during our session, please feel free to drop them in the chat box and we'll be sure to reach out after the session concludes. I'd like to welcome our presenter, Dominic Nguyen, who will kick things off. Dominic, over to you.
Dominic Nguyen
Thank you, Kaitlin. So welcome to Wolters Kluwer, CCH Tagetik’s Budgeting Planning Forecasting webinar. My name is Dominic Nguyen. I'm a presale support manager here at Wolters Kluwer. I've been in the business for over 20 years, strong background in finance and consulting. So I'm very excited to walk you through the demonstration today. Before we do that, let's actually talk a little bit about some of the challenges we see with CFOs. Obviously, number one is keeping pace. A lot of competition out there, right, with people, process, and technology leading the way, right? Digital transformation is the forefront as AI is becoming a hot topic, and how do we deal with that, right? The complexities with data, right, as we grow organically internally or acquire companies, the complexity around multiple data systems and making sure that's accurate. the quality and efficiency of the processes, but ultimately the goal is to get to a point where you can have increased data analysis and push us into an environment where it's more enterprise-wide. And that's kind of what we're seeing out there in the marketplace today. A little example, Wolters Kluwer was a $6 billion publicly traded global provider. We have offices in APAC, Europe and North America, 20,000 employees, work with many large organizations. from large manufacturers, pharmaceuticals, to name a few, helping those organizations transform their financial processes. I want to talk a little bit about our CCH Tagetik unified intelligent platform. What does that mean? Well, we're able to help organizations from the full life cycle of starting at the beginning of financial close, whether you have multiple entities and currencies, to closing the books with processes that help millions of records and doing transaction matching, account reconciliations, all the way down to the last mile of disclosure management, just to name a few. We also have ability to help with corporate tax and regulatory, but our focus today is around planning. Well, planning is a broad term. What does that mean? Traditionally, we're talking about financial planning, but the concept of extended planning means operational planning, supply and demand, and bringing in many different data systems, the declining of the integrated business planning to also helping industry-specific areas where there's a SaaS company, a manufacturing, a services company, all those organizations are very unique in their own right. So being able to accommodate some of those uniqueness is very important. Talk of the town really is about AI. We've been doing this for quite a long time. We're very good at it in terms of being able to help organizations in terms of AI auto mapping, where those may have millions of records that are done manually to be able to prove the process and timing, anomaly detection, whether it's based on certain thresholds. Predictive planning, right, giving you ability to kind of automate some of those process compared to different versions and variance analysis to AI driver-based analysis where maybe looking at multiple years of actuals, but also bringing in external data, whether it's weather data or other types of metrics that you want to analyze and kind of see what the model dictates and helps you make those decisions. ultimately to get you an intelligent analytics platform. So that's really the deliver the value of better predictions and better speed across the organization. With the demonstration day, just a high level, we'll take a look at dashboards and analytics, automated reporting, how we can streamline those processes, spend a lot of time on annual budgets from top level, bottoms up, driver base. touch on some key areas, revenue expenses, headcount, look at some industry-specific examples that I mentioned previously, and we'll close it out with forecasting and reporting. Okay, let's actually get started. One of the things that is very popular with a lot of financial professionals is being able to have dashboards and analytics to be able to see visuals that give us insight into the business, whether it's sales information, operation or headcount information as you see. Or if you want to focus on a specific key area, obviously revenue and sales is top of the list. But very quickly with dashboards, I'm able to gain insights into the business and I can see there's a delta here within the North America. What does that mean? I probably want to answer the why question. I drill into the information, look at data, a trend around the business by quarters or potentially by different months. I'm able to quickly see in February, June, and October, I've got some downward trend. I want to see that's kind of a little bit off. I need to investigate. I want to talk with some of my VP of sales or potentially my product managers to understand why. I can also look at things like sales-related information, right? information that who am I selling it to, whether it's from a product or customer perspective. If I want to focus on products, for example, I can see where my funnel is, where I'm selling mostly in the retail channel. I can also kind of see all my top products or what are my top three products I'm selling. That gives me great information to potentially change my marketing channel or change my strategy. So looking at different products, looking at by customer, we've got that flexibility ability to really look at information and slice and dice it in many different aspects. And so as each individual business have unique needs, we can talk about that at a later point in time. KPIs are very popular, whether you're looking at net sales to margin to inventory to really just depends on the industry or maybe the net results versus compared to budget. Being able to drill into that information and get more data behind the pictures or numbers is really important. So if I want to focus, for example, on net sales and I want to see kind of the threshold behind what's happening there as well as the trends. So very quickly, I could see right now my product sales is lagging behind my budget, so I have some work to do. So based on that threshold, I probably want to investigate that and kind of spend more time figuring out how I can improve that. So these are just some quick examples of how to generate information and make strategic decisions. I want to talk a bit about AI in terms of Ask AI, right? So this is becoming very popular. I'm asking what are my top sales products and my top five, it gives me that information. So there's more on this that's obviously improving over time, but it's really here to stay. It's been the trend and it's going to be helping a lot of organizations streamline and be more efficient. Now switching gears, I want to talk a little bit about the planning process and we'll start off with a top level strategic plan. What does that mean? I'm able to plan at different aspects, so whether it's top level or total organization or let's focus on just the USA division or Europe. It's really up to us, but each individual budget stakeholder or executive can focus on those key areas. So in this example, I'm filtered on USA, right? I've got some macroeconomic drivers here, whether it's sales assumptions or different types of assumptions. I'm able to modify that. So based on the information I've just analyzed, I might want to switch it up and maybe it's more of a pessimistic view in year two, but I think I'm going to do a lot better in year three. So I can say, well, I can potentially think I'm going to do a little bit better, more. proactively think it's going to be impacting my business better. So in that aspect, if it's going to be lower on year two, I can add, for example, this maybe it's a terrorist, right? There's a big impact today in the business. You can also add attachments to kind of give you some color detail around the issue. So I'm going to actually save this and document that, right? So that collaboration that happens with the tariffs, I'm able to document it so that way it helps my approver understand that these notes help me understand why I made those adjustments and seeing. But in addition to that, it's just not at the macroeconomic level, right? I can actually update kind of my interest rate or inflation rate, right? More at a granular level and save that off. So that's just kind of an interaction, right? But what's really nice about this is it's something that we can organize and configure based on these are just examples. and really give the executive that quick insight into the top-level planning. I'm going to switch gears a little bit and talk about the annual plan. And before I do that, I can talk about the different processes, whether sales, payroll expenses, financial reporting. But this left side here is our organizational hierarchy. It's just an example. We've got a lot of flexibility. It's organized by New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, rolling up to all USA. We've got Europe operations, different entities potentially. But it's also tied to what we call a workflow, right? So we can see the status of where people stand, who's working, who's not working, right? Who's the laggard in the departments or the various organizations? So we can easily see how to contact them and nudge them a little bit, right? You can be as annoying as you want if you wanted to, but that collaboration and seeing where people stand is very important. We've also got different tasks that you can assign. Obviously, these are some examples where I might be able to have the ability to load in data. I might update my sales plan. But I want to spend a little time and bring up a very specific industry. In this example, it's more focused on the subscription-based revenue around SaaS companies, which do things like from a revenue recognition, Again, these are some examples where we can help manufacturing companies, retail companies, pharmaceuticals. The sky's really the limit, but we won't have time to go over every single industry vertical. But in this example, it's really about helping drive the forecast and the plan based on some of these drivers. In this example, we've got things like organic growth, churn rate, strategic growth rates, and some assumptions and drivers and seeing the trend's impact. We've also got the way to bring it down to more of a model where I might make a core set of data. So maybe it's a holiday push or a social media campaign. It's going to see how it's impact my sales user growth model, right? We can also do adjustments. from that model, so more of a manual adjustment so that I might say this particular month is going to be an additional adjustment on top of that. So it's a combination of driving the model with human intervention that be able to drive some of that. And this is a user growth model. We've got other examples like the revenue growth model to kind of give you an idea of where we can help drive some of the uniqueness for each individual customer. This here is talking about different regression models. So all this information on the left side where it's gray is all the actual information. And basically I might want to see how my moving average model and it kind of helps predict the revenue growth based on the different models and drivers. So again, quick examples, but you kind of see what the flexibility is to help from a planning perspective at the top level. I'm going actually start with expenses here. The idea or concept of planning expenses is more kind of the blocking and tackling of budgeting and planning, right? How does an end user interact with it? You notice there, and I'll take a look at both, but we'll start off with a web interaction where you can have a template that is accessed through the web. We'll spend some time and look at how we can do it with Excel, which is also very easy to use, fundamentally using the same Excel formulas that people are used to. So a lot of flexibility, but We'll start off with what you're looking at here is an expense template. Now, again, we're looking at New York for 2025 budget for the accounting budget stakeholder. We've got different general ledger accounts. We've got the way to add some what we call global commentary notes at a individual GL account level. So if you want to explain an issue on a particular account at that level, you can do that. You can also enter data, right? The simplest way to get data into the system here is to enter a number, right? So, for March in a specific deal account, you might want to document that similar to what we've done earlier, right? You can kind of see some of these cell notes here that documents the anomaly I talked about to really drive it. It's stayed and saved at that cell level, so it kind of rolls up based on that hierarchy as well. We've also got the ability to do things in terms of, for example, maybe we want to plan down at a what we call a line item detail level. So in this example, it's particular expense that I want to detail out more granularity. So we've got. Two line item details here, but obviously we can add more. So if there's a large expense that you wanted to add, you can add to it. Why is this important? Because a lot of times people want to know why an expense is larger than normal. Instead of picking up the phone and spending a lot of time, you can easily document that. Also, what's kind of interesting that is very valuable is a lot of end users potentially make mistakes. So we've added this ability to do what we call a data validation rule. So in this example, it's highlighted and telling me that it's not going to be able to do that because it's over a certain threshold. I won't be able to save that, right? It's not until I adjust that basically and it really allows me to save that now based on that data validation rule. So Let's actually move on and kind of show you some additional really cool features around how a budget stakeholder can improve the budgeting planning process. And keep in mind, it's all centralized under one shared platform. So the accounting budget stakeholder, the. finance stakeholder or the marketing stakeholder are all interacting with the system and it consolidates up for you. So that aggregation of information is very valuable. So no more, whether you're in Excel, shipping templates around or inefficient system, we're here to help improve that process. I want to talk a little bit about how we can help. do some what we call basic spreading. So we talked about inputting at the individual month and account level, but if I wanted to, for example, if I had a specific cap and I want to spread that back for that particular yeller account, I can do that at the whole year. You notice that it spreads it back based on a pro-rata basis. Well, what if I'm just lazy and I just want to do it at a very macro level, right? I want to do total year, total expenses for all accounts. So you notice there very quickly with that ability to kind of enter, it's going to spread the entire back based on that particular spread technique in terms of prorata basis. I also can plan additional years. So even though I'm planning right now at the monthly level for my current 25 budget, notice that I can also plan for the 26 budget here, right? In this example, maybe by year, maybe by quarter. So typically a lot of organizations will do that more at a higher level. Well, just to kind of show you that these are just Excel formulas, right? So I might want to do the average of the 12 months, right? Simple Excel formula. So in that extent, you can see that I'm taking that and calculating that for the entire month. And I might just kind of drag that all the way down for all accounts, right? So again, just proving to you that it's just simple Excel, very easy to use, and it's very popular. And a lot of organizations will increase their user adoption based on that Excel interface and the common formulas that everybody's used to. I also want to talk a little bit about allocation. So if you notice here, there's an account called Allocate Expenses. We have a great allocation model that can do things from shared costs, whether it's rent, IT costs, push it down and put the percentages based on headcount or based on percentage basis, based on square footage. And obviously, when you pull it up at the consolidated level, it nets off to zero. So our allocation engine is very powerful, very scalable. So we've helped a lot of organizations do some very robust, even down to certain revenue methods or down to certain dimensions by product and customer if you need to. But I want to make that point just because it's very important to know that you can easily do some allocations as part of our processes. We also have travel budgets, right? Planning down to individual trips, lodging meals, where there's different marketing campaigns. Again, these are just additional extensible planning options that we had talked about and kind of helping organizations. So we can do a lot of different areas, but these are just some quick examples for our webinar today. I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about how we plan headcount. You notice I've got employee expenses here, right? So I'm going to actually switch gears, I'm going to be able to now start planning my headcount. Why is this important? Well, headcount is a big component of a lot of organizations and they're able to bring in information from different HR systems, plan at the... headcount level, individual names by roles, have global assumptions. We'll take care of all of that, but it's really up to the organization how material they are. I've worked with some CFOs that are getting very granular, and I've worked with some where they're just, okay, just give me a global assumption, and we're done. That's fine. So what you're looking at now is just really bringing in all that existing roster, and if you wanted to plan for additional headcount here, you can easily just say, I want to hire a new vice president. Every budget stakeholder can do this, right? Because you could respectively only see the right data appropriately based on security. So I want to hire one new vice president. Maybe they start out in the future. They could be a full-time or contract, or they can be salary, hourly based. Really up to you, right? So once that's all populated, you can save that, and every individual budget stakeholder at the department can handle this. We can also do things like being able to do some transfers. So you notice here we've got the ability to transfer people. We can also term people. So all of that really is to taking the appropriate cost and allocating it to the right department. So if this person is going to be transferring instead of Madrid, maybe they're going to be transferring to a different part of the business, they're going to come back to New York. We can base that. So all the associated cost rolls with them. And we can do things like build attrition reports and kind of see where the movements of the different employees are. And we'd like to close out the headcount planning, you can expect is high-level global assumptions, things that are standard, FICA food, the rates that don't change. Obviously, that is part of it. Or you can create different types of benefits to fringe benefits, maybe stock options. But really the sky's the limit on how we can build headcount planning. But very quick example of some of those things. All right, so we've got the ability to do a lot of different examples. We'll come back to really different aspects. But the idea of concept is once you do that, we now can take a look at a financial report. So consolidated reporting, right? So whether you're looking at P&L, balancing, and cash flow, and automating that process is very important. In this example, what you're going to see is a high-level KPI dashboard that's more based off Excel. So you can see some of that formatting that you're used to. But the idea is to bring in and look at budget versus other versions in the P&L, the variances around that based on certain threshold, right? You can set that up. different types of cash flow, indirect and direct cash flow, and obviously the balance sheet, right? One nice thing about this is just kind of notice that we can also take a look at data, but if you have curiosity on why some of these variances are, I can actually drill into the actuals and get that level of granularity. So in this case here, I drilled into accounts receivables. I able to kind of see the transaction that make that up. I talked about SAP HANA. That's one of our key differentiators. So we can drill back into SAP HANA with our prebuilt connector. We're actually the only vendor that is certified on SAP, and that's very, very important. But overall, we're here to help a lot of different areas from different types of reporting. And I want to kind of show you another area of reporting. This is kind of the more of the end product of a month end reporting process. We have a tight integration with Microsoft Office, so we can bring in Microsoft Word in terms of, but also tie it to the workflow where I can assign certain sections of my board book, right? A little bit about kind of what we're looking at is, you know, these different areas can be assigned to people, but I also can what we call run a diagnostic The diagnostic is very important because if you got a lot of people interacting with sections of your report, you want to make sure it's accurate. Very quickly, I can see that. But keeping in mind, it's very flexible for us to build these reports quickly so they get automated and updated as information changes. We can actually now look at where another key aspect is forecasting. Keep in mind, just to close out that thought, we can do it in PowerPoint presentations. We can do it in Microsoft Word. And this is the Excel interface. I talked about that, right? The tight integration with Office. And just real quick, this is a forecasting template, right? Same expense template, but the first three months here are locked down. Did you notice that? And I've got a 3 + 9 forecast. So what's really nice is that you can continue to do all the things that you want, but maybe you want to do a forecast that's, I'll show you a quick example where we can actually do a spreading, but we want to be able to actually, let's actually lock potentially three months there. So that way if you wanted to make a quick change, you see here, it's going to do that, but it's only going to do it on the months that it's unlocked. So pretty cool, but the forecasting, the rolling forecast, you'll be able to do that. see the variance between budgets and forecasts, maybe make some various explanations to help explain some of the differences. We can do driver-based. If you want to take an average of three months, you want to be able to input and maybe drive it based on assumption. All those are very standard that we can easily help you in terms of helping organizations. But forecasting is very important. The way you do it is very unique and we'll spend more time learning how those requirements are to build that accordingly. Okay, so with that, I actually want to talk a little bit about AI. I talked about AI being a very important aspect of the business. And so what you're going to look at next is just some quick examples of how we can help, whether it's auto mapping, I think anomaly detection is a very big one. So once you bring in all your actual information, run through a process and let it determine what the outliers are. And based on that, you can kind of see here, right, I could be focused on certain key products. So maybe I want to focus on a certain platform like hardware for all my channels. And maybe I want to look at a metric like volume, right? So once you define your point of view and filters, you can kind of see now in this example, right, I can quickly see Most of this was inliers in terms of being able to see where it's in a specific threshold, but our key outlier is 64%. So what does that mean? Well, obviously I can drill into that detail and see where that is and why it is. And is that correct? That's where the human intervention is, but you can see all the actual data and where it fits within the threshold. And that particular data point is outside that. So that's really our outlier. That's just a very quick example. We've got a lot of other examples in terms of being able to help from an AI perspective. So we can actually talk more as we get into AI driver-based analysis. So bringing in data that's internal and external customer satisfaction data or external data from weather that I mentioned and really check the information. So I'll show you another quick example just to kind of show you like how that would work. But all that data gets brought in, right? It gets analyzed right through the AI engine. And this example here is going to smooth it out based on the volume metric that we talked about, right? We can kind of play around with the different drivers, so whether it's based on price or based on different drivers and how it's impacted, and also the associated detail around that, right? So how it's impacting price, how it's impacting volume, right? So again, We can bring in predictive intelligence as well, right? So we can also do a lot of these things. But I'll close it out and just kind of let everybody know that AI is very popular. There's a lot of processes that we can help. But let's get to know you better, right? Let's get to know your unique requirements and then we can go from there. I really hope you enjoyed the presentation today. I want to thank you for your time. I appreciate everybody and we can follow up at a later point in time if there's any additional questions. Thank you.
