CPM applications, such as financial consolidation and PB&F, require some of their output to be formatted as structured financial statements so reporting tools should support specific generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) accounting presentation rules, such as U.S. GAAP or IFRS, to enable preparation of statutory financial statements with appropriate commentary and supplementary notes.

Financial Reporting solutions should:

• Incorporate templates, business rules, workflow and audit trails to better meet regulatory, compliance and governance programs.
• Support financial-reporting technologies, such as XBRL, as regulators increasingly require the submission of financial statements in XBRL format.

CPM applications should also provide management reporting capabilities which

• Used by executives at corporate and business unit levels to manage and explain financial performance.
• Enables groups of reports to be produced electronically or in printed form, with the ability to add annotations and commentary.
• Includes visualization techniques specifically designed to support analysis of variance from budgets or targets and comparisons with historical performance.
• Integration with dashboard and scorecard applications, as well as specific visualization techniques, such as decision trees, heat maps and hyperbolic trees.