Host Analytics Release Enhances Automation, Reporting, Analytics, and Strategic Planning Features
Includes integration with Box to automate and streamline data processing and integration for finance departments.
Host Analytics, a cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM) specialist, is now shipping its Summer ‘14 Release packed with new features and enhancements to improve process automation, reporting, analytics, and strategic planning. The new release includes numerous new cloud EPM features, including Cloud Scheduler to automate critical EPM maintenance processes such as data integration; a time sets feature to simplify long-term strategic planning; and a report collections feature to automate report generation and distribution. The Summer ‘14 Release also includes new dashboards for CFOs, business analytics enhancements, and increased drill-down flexibility for dynamic reporting.
The new release of the Host Analytics EPM Suite also features a deep integration with Box that enables organizations to streamline data processing by providing users the ability to automatically move and load financial information from flat files with the security advantages of Box but without the need for a third-party integration platform.
Automation
Leveraging a new integration with Box, the new cloud scheduler feature allows customers to benefit from “lights-out” processing, when integrating data from financial and accounting files. Users can quickly and easily schedule a data upload from Box and move flat file data into the Host Analytics Cloud Platform. They simply upload, e-mail, or sync files to the Box cloud environment and Host Analytics automatically uses pre-configured rules to upload the data.
The Summer ’14 release also introduces a new cloud EPM capability: report collections lets finance and accounting automate the generation and distribution of reports. For example, in larger organizations with many P&L managers, the finance team typically has to manually assemble monthly reports customized for each business unit manager. With report collections, they can reduce that time-consuming, tedious process to a matter of minutes.
Reporting and Analytics
The Summer ’14 Release offers new dashboards for CFOs that provides all the capabilities for an at-a-glance summary of key metrics delivered via high-level charts, reports, and narratives. Key features include self-service business intelligence, 24 pixel-perfect chart types, and interactive drill-down. CFOs can get key information and analysis on mission-critical areas such as what-if scenarios, customer churn, and recurring revenue. The CFO Dashboard also provides analysis capabilities on such elements as bookings, revenue, head count, customers, operations, and billing.
Significant enhancements have been made to Host Analytics Business Analytics. The new release includes new trellis charts, making it easy to compare several smaller charts along with 24 existing chart types. Users can leverage hierarchical views of data and have access to drag-and-drop report selections, new aggregation options, and expanded drill-down capabilities.
Dynamic reports, an EPM report generator that combines ad hoc and presentation-quality reporting, has added drill-down and drill-through options. Customers can now drill down on any combination of groupings, such as operational expenses by GL account and sub-account, roll-ups such as total expenses, and even drill-through to transactions on time roll-ups such as year to date.
Strategic Planning
Host Analytics’ new time sets feature makes it easier for organizations to conduct strategic planning over longer time horizons. Rather than entering data such as forecasted revenue or operational expenses for every month, customers can input data in quarterly and yearly time frames as they look further into the future. Host Analytics customers can now create multi-year plans that utilize a monthly time set for the first year, quarterly for the next two years, and annually for the remaining years. The new release also allows customers to reuse time sets across a variety of models.
More Information
The Summer ’14 Release is shipping today. More information is available at http://www.hostanalytics.com.