Five of our Customer’s Favorite Calumo Features
Five Popular xP&A Features to Help Your Business Generate Value From Data
When researching the right extended planning & analysis (xP&A) solution for your business, look for a business partner who can offer a range of capabilities in one cost-effective and user-friendly solution. You need a system that empowers your organization with automated reporting, planning, and budgeting features that support xP&A to significantly enhance your corporate performance management.
You need a solution that:
- Automates. Streamline your manual processes to save time, improve efficiency, and reduce risk and errors. Give time, and control, back to your staff so they spend less time struggling with spreadsheets, and more time analyzing data.
- Integrates. Break down information silos and integrate disparate datasets into a single source of truth. Leverage data from across the business to drive strategic, financial, and operational planning and analytics. Create trust through greater transparency.
- Simplifies. Explore built-in scenario analysis and predictive insights with confidence and share the right information with the right people, at the right time. Eliminate long planning cycles and improve agility with accurate and continuous forecasting.
Calumo frees your data professionals from painful manual data management tasks by aggregating data from disparate systems, and automating reporting processes. Your team can spend this time collaborating with business partners to provide regular, rapid data analysis to support business outcomes.
Here are five of our customers’ favorite Calumo features to help your business generate value from its data.
1. Magic Views (or “Drill to View”)–See Beyond the Smoke and Mirrors
Magic Views (or ‘Drill to View”) is a trick that every financial planning and analysis (FP&A) professional should have up their sleeve. At the click of a button, you can see the context behind every number on a report, without needing to delve into multiple data sources for the truth. Magic Views will save you hours of manually sifting through data. This time can now be spent on making informed strategic decisions.
Practically, Magic Views allows you to select a cell on a report and drill out to a view of that datapoint, serving as a starting point for further analysis. From here, you have the full power of the data explorer at your fingertips. Calumo creates that view on the fly based on the number you choose–that’s the magic part.
Why not just drill to transactions from the report? Well, you could do that, and often will, but Magic Views is another way to help you refine your analysis. You can surface the handful of items that are really driving the result you are chasing like cost centers, products, and categories before jumping off into the transactions that are root cause.
Try it for yourself. Open a report, click on a number and press the Magic View button on the report toolbar. Then you can slice, dice, dynamically chart and drill to transactions to your heart’s content from the Magic View immediately!
If you’d like to learn more about Magic Views, or Calumo, and how it can benefit your team – contact us today.
2. Linked Analytics–Easily Revisit Your Favorite Data Investigations
Are you still stuck working from disparate spreadsheets? If so, when you’re presented with a discrepancy in your data, you’ll be used to sifting through related reports, refreshing old analysis and downloading transactions from the general ledger (GL) and accounts payable (AP) systems before rushing to develop a solution.
This manual process wastes a huge amount of valuable time that could be spent better understanding the problem and strategically developing a solution. Furthermore, by doing everything manually, you are creating risk in a function that despises risk.
But not if you’re using Linked Analytics with Calumo.
With Linked Analytics, you can create future value from any time you spend on Calumo. Any reports or views which share dimensions with each other can be meaningfully joined together to help you analyze data faster than ever before. There is no duplication of effort. This is just another way that Calumo gives you back time otherwise spent on reporting so you can spend it on analysis, communication and partnering with your business to make data-driven decisions that lift everyone’s future performance.
3. Publications–Actionable Insights Delivered Straight to your Inbox
Getting the right information to the right people at the right time is one of our key missions. Checking the Calumo platform is easy, but why not skip that step and have actionable insights delivered directly to you and your key stakeholders?
Publications is a useful Calumo feature that automates the scheduled distribution of reports to select Calumo users via email, either as an image, PDF, or Excel workbook. Regular, automated sharing of data not only saves your team time, but has many far-reaching organizational benefits.
Anywhere, any device, Publications gives your stakeholders access the right information at a time which suits them. The best part is, Publications links directly back to the source Calumo report, allowing your users to investigate further with just the click of a button.
4. Meta–Increase your Organization’s Data Literacy
Calumo’s Meta enables deeper collaboration across your organization’s data. In a nutshell, Meta allows you to label all your Calumo assets, providing crucial contextual information to all users of that analysis.
Say goodbye to repetitive calls explaining your reports and data views. With just a few clicks you can significantly reduce those endless enquiries to your Finance team, increase your users’ data literacy, and ensure longevity of your reporting even after you, or whoever created the asset, has long left the team.
5. Start Pages–Reduce Barrier to Entry and Training Effort
Are you considering integrating Calumo but are worried about the training effort involved in up-skilling all stakeholders? Or are you a current power-user looking to share specific reports or apps without needing to teach your colleagues the full detail of our platform?
Well rest easy, we have you covered. At insightsoftware we understand the importance of reducing training costs and the eliminating need explain the platform every time you want to share an asset. That’s why we created Start Pages.
In essence, Start Pages hides most of Calumo’s functionality and allows admin users to choose the entry point for users based on group membership. Through Start Pages you can ensure specific users only see relevant reports, views, apps and URLs. Not just limited to single reports, Start Pages can be linked to a Calumo app creating a portal to a range of specific analysis that can be customized at any time.
Financial reporting and analysis needs will differ for each team within your organization. Start Pages addresses this fact, further reducing Calumo’s already-low barrier to entry and streamlining your workflow.
What the Right xP&A Solution Should Offer You
Control of Your Data. Ditch the spreadsheets and move your disparate data sources into Calumo. By integrating your entire back catalogue of historic data into our system, you can easily slice and dice by any metric you choose, enabling efficient and accurate analysis and forecasting.
Easy Budgeting and Planning. Calumo’s business intelligence and financial planning & analysis tools make year-end a breeze. You’ll use the same platform for planning and forecasting as you do for month-end reporting, with instant access to data. Our smart templates allow teams to create budgets, business models, and rolling forecasts that are updated in real-time from the one application, using our built-in writeback feature.
Accurate Forecasting to Boost Agility. Explore intuitive, built-in scenario analysis and predictive insights with confidence, and share the right information with the right people, at the right time. Eliminate long planning cycles and improve agility with accurate and continuous forecasting. Accelerate planning and decision-making with real-time updates to dashboards, accessible by users on any device.
Quick ROI. Calumo is cost-effective and simple to use. Our platform will efficiently integrate with all your existing systems to allow staff to continue their work uninterrupted. Don’t spend weeks training staff in tools too complex to be sustainable. If you can use a spreadsheet, you can use CALUMO.
Better Collaboration. Numbers create common ground that aligns employees to the goals of business and increases buy-in. Cloud-based corporate performance management (CPM) platforms like Calumo enable this in every way. With inbuilt rich-text commentary that employees can read and respond to in real-time, Calumo makes it easy for your teams to work collaboratively, free from versioned spreadsheets and lengthy, unsecure email chains.
Increase Data Accountability and Ownership. Calumo’s real-time reports, visualizations, and dashboards boost data transparency, so that the wider business can easily identify any anomalies and investigate further. Automated reminders from your CPM system can highlight inconsistencies and ensure that data is maintained in the long-term.
Security For Your Data. You won’t find any other business intelligence tool with Calumo’s level of data security. We continually monitor and improve our security systems, to ensure your data is completely protected at all times. Additionally, Calumo is cloud-based and reduces the risk associated with sharing sensitive information via email attachments.
Shorter Closes. You don’t need to dread month-end. Calumo automates all your reporting processes, reducing your month-end effort from days to hours to, and in some cases, minutes. Constantly changing figures, like your working capital and target product mix, are updated automatically and are easy to track in your forecasting. With your core system data directly feeding and updating in real-time, you can be confident your numbers are correct.
A Platform for Efficiency. The same Calumo solution that does these things also helps the rest of your business. Your AR people can collaboratively hunt outstanding debt. AP can manage expenses and charges. HR can conduct talent and remuneration review processes. Finance can manage monthly rolling forecasts. Non-financial staff can engage in all manner of data-related activities more quickly and effectively. Costs go down and productivity rises.
To learn more about Calumo and how it can benefit your team, request a demo today.