Analyst Perspectives

Tagetik is a long-established vendor of financial performance management (FPM) software. Its full-featured suite includes planning, budgeting, consolidation, close management, disclosure management, analysis, dashboards and reporting. The software can be deployed on premises or in the cloud as multitenant software as a service or in a private cloud. Tagetik also offers pre-built integration with SAP and SAP HANA, Microsoft SharePoint and Qlik to best support a range of financial management needs.

The current release, Tagetik 5, has a pleasing and productive consumer-style interface. Its design approach aims at enhancing the user experience and making it easier and less time-consuming to perform common tasks in finance and accounting departments. FPM is a mature software category that generally deals with the full cycle of finance department activities as well as the underlying information technology systems that support them. Thus there are limited differences between vendors’ suites in the required features and functions. We find that buyers often select products by how they execute particular tasks and especially how easy it is to perform them. In response FPM vendors have been putting greater emphasis in the design of their software to enhance the user experience, often through a consumer-style interface.

Tagetik addresses the ease-of-use issue in its current release, Tagetik 5, by making it easier for business analysts to create and update basic dashboards without the need for IT department involvement or coding. This facilitates communication and performance monitoring. Users can work in Microsoft Excel, but behind this interface are all of the capabilities of a well-developed software application and database, which eliminate issues that occur when desktop spreadsheets are used in any repetitive collaborative enterprise process such as financial planning and closing. Unlike in desktop spreadsheets, rolling up and consolidating data submissions of any number of participants in a process is almost instantaneous in Tagetik 5. Moreover, unlike desktop spreadsheets, it stores the data with important attributes such as the time period, corporate structure (division or regions, for example), product (anywhere from families down to specific stock keeping units – SKUs – if desired) and currency.

The software also offers comprehensive and easy-to-use administration capabilities, especially in creating and modifying business processes for the full range of financial performance management activities. This capability is more than just a convenience for a few people in the finance department. It can make it easier for whole companies to accelerate planning cycles and facilitates high-participation planning and budgeting processes. Modifying processes also enables companies to tightly manage their accounting close process. Our benchmark research on the fast, clean close shows that companies that successfully shorten their close most often (in 71%) attributed their success to being able to manage the process effectively and consistently. With a limited amount of training and no coding, finance department users of Tagetik can define and manage every step of the close process. It supports a continuous improvement approach to managing the close by making it straightforward for the department to modify these individual processes and subprocesses as they assess sources of delay and inefficiency in their close.

Tagetik also supports more strategic finance processes. For example, it provides a platform that enables all parts of the business to plan in ways that conform to their needs and preferences and while still combining these plans into an integrated view as our next generation business planning research found makes planning processes to work better. For another, it facilitates the integration of long-term and strategic plans and company budgets. Our research in strategic and long-range planning finds that two-thirds of those that have fully or mostly integrated the two types can respond to changes immediately or soon enough, compared to just 22 percent of companies that have little or no integration.

The suite’s Disclosure Management offering was designed to help corporations manage the creation, editing and publication of external disclosure documents such as those required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission or other regulatory bodies such as bank regulators in European countries for their Common Reporting (COREP)requirements. However, this capability is also useful for automating a range of report creation functions, especially documents for internal or external use that combine text and data. For instance, users can create Microsoft PowerPoint and Word templates with text, numbers and graphics that can be automatically updated with the latest period’s data. Using this capability accelerates production of reports while cutting the staff time required to produce them. It’s easy to achieve bullet-proof accuracy since the numbers in the tables are assembled from a single authoritative source, and references in the text to a specific item in a table (an absolute amount or a percentage change, for example) are always in agreement, even when there are last-minute changes. Thus it is relatively easy to put together a periodic PowerPoint presentation for the senior leadership team or board of directors. It’s especially handy for creating monthly, quarterly and annual reports because once designed, the numbers can be quickly updated to the latest period.

I recommend that companies looking for a financial performance management suite – especially those that are replacing a point solution (such as obsolete financial consolidation software) or those moving away from spreadsheets – add Tagetik to their list of vendors to consider.

Regards,

Robert Kugel – SVP Research