If you look back at the history of most Financial Planning and Analysis systems implementations, you’ll see a software development lifecycle that became very complicated very quickly. As the concept of a functional, dynamic database became more accepted within the community, we saw more and more advanced tools being built to take advantage of that capability.
What this looked like in practice though, was highly customized and immensely complicated local implementations that often required an entire internal development team to maintain and implement – locking out many users from ever being able to meaningfully engage with the system itself.
This is something we’ve been working to fix here at Apliqo, and the administration module in the FPM suite enables greater customization and personalization without compromising on any of the features that make the tool so powerful.
You shouldn’t be reliant on developers
While we love software developers as much as the next company, we don’t think that ordinary financial users should have to continually rely on their expertise to make changes to the FP&A ecosystem. After all, this is what these users leverage every single day of their working life. When you’re reliant on someone with specific technical skills, it creates bottlenecks that not only slow the process down but also disempowers users from getting the most out of your system.
This is where user-friendly control panels are so powerful. And often it shows up in places that you don’t expect.
Leveraging the FPM administration module
You might be aware of the Apliqo UX product which transforms any powerful TM1 / Planning Analytics system into a sleek and user-friendly interface that completely changes the feel of the product. However, there is more hiding in plain sight – the FPM administration module.
What the administration module allows you to do is to make granular tweaks and changes to underlying variables and permutations that then affect the rest of your FP&A system on a macro level. Everything from security permissions, charts of accounts, business segmentation, data loading, currency conversions, workforce planning, and more can be adjusted and controlled using an intuitive administration menu.
This puts power back into the hands of the users and ensures that you can take complete ownership of your financial reporting and planning system – to squeeze every last piece of value out of it. This is not to say that you’ll never need to use a developer– but it does drastically reduce your reliance on them because everything can be accomplished through the same interface that you’re already familiar with.
All of this is to say that if you haven’t discovered the administration module yet, it’s time that you have a look. There is a tremendous amount of depth and nuance that you can capture with just the click of a button or the swish of a toggle. It’s just another way that Apliqo is working to make FP&A tools more accessible and approachable for users of all kinds.
But remember: with great power, comes great responsibility. Use it wisely.
