TM1 Forum

I am a new user of TM1, so please bear with me...

About me: This is the third management reporting solution that I have exposure to, including my time as a DBA for Hyperion Enterprise, and a power-user with SAP BPC. I have over 20 years of Accounting & Financial Analysis experience primarily in the Insurance Industry, and I also have a few years in systems & support. In my current role, I am NOT in a support or administrator position with TM1, but I intend to become a power-user if humanly possible (I now have 8 months of TM1 exposure/experience).

My Situation: I am currently responsible for the monthly production of the financial statements for our entire organization, which include a Balance Sheet and Income Statement for each company and for various consolidation reports. We currently have 3 different balance sheets, and 5 different income statements due to the complexity of our month-end reporting requirements (and those are combined with a number of different legal entity subset lists for report production). When the dust settles, and after approximately 30 minutes of my life disappearing, I have 57 reports and am done - until they decide to change actuals/budget/forecast and I have to run them all over again!

My Question: In my past experience with management reporting tools, there were ways to automate, or at least streamline, the reporting cycle. With Hyperion Enterprise, for example, they had something called Auto-Pilot which allowed you to string together various tasks (data clears, data loads, report production, etc.) and schedule them to run when needed (this was at a previous employer). With SAP BPC we had a script that we updated monthly (simply changing the reporting period) that allowed us to run these 57 reports in ~5 minutes.

Does anyone have any tips/tricks/suggestions as to how to make this process more efficient?

You will have my eternal gratitude if you have any suggestions that will help!

daishomaster wrote: We currently have 3 different balance sheets, and 5 different income statements due to the complexity of our month-end reporting requirements (and those are combined with a number of different legal entity subset lists for report production). When the dust settles, and after approximately 30 minutes of my life disappearing, I have 57 reports and am done - until they decide to change actuals/budget/forecast and I have to run them all over again!

Daishomaster
Welcome to the forum and thanks for setting the background to your query so clearly. However, I am unclear what exactly your problem is. When you talk about producing reports is this just printing\distributing the printed reports or do you include running data loads via a TI process? Are the reports via Excel slices, websheets or some other mechanism?

TM1 allows you to chain together TI processes and run them as scheduled chores or on-demand but I am not sure if that will necessarily help you. To be frank, TM1 itself does not have much in the way of automated reporting apart from the fairly basic Report Generator. If you want to automate a report production process you can either write VBA code or look at one of the batch printing utilities written by (generally) legacy Applix partners. Several of them post on here and I am sure they can suggest what to look at!

Do you have Cognos BI linked to TM1? I believe that has some sophisticated report bursting and distribution functions but that will of course add to cost and complexity.

"I have 57 reports and am done - until they decide to change actuals/budget/forecast and I have to run them all over again!" I am not sure what you mean by Run them all over again.

Sorry I am missing a key point in your question , do you then send the TM1 reports via email to individuals ?

Why don't you allow the users to just pick the Entity and Period and since the data is in the cube only ask them to refresh the work sheet ?

Self Service is the way to go really.

daishomaster wrote:....You will have my eternal gratitude if you have any suggestions that will help!

Daishomaster,
I feel in need of some eternal gratitude today so thought I would bump your post. Also to remind you that both Mr Leeson and I think you need to provide more information about your problem. If you do I am sure there will be some helpful suggestions!

stephen waters wrote: ...I am unclear what exactly your problem is. When you talk about producing reports is this just printing\distributing the printed reports or do you include running data loads via a TI process? Are the reports via Excel slices, websheets or some other mechanism? .....Do you have Cognos BI linked to TM1? I believe that has some sophisticated report bursting and distribution functions but that will of course add to cost and complexity.

My apologies for not checking back on this post in a more timely manner, and my thanks for your kind replies.

I will try to elaborate on my situation:

Each of the reports I have to run is an excel slice, and I have them built as follows:

Balance Sheets:
Individual
Consolidated
GAAP Consolidated (special data source)

Income Statement:
Individual
Individual without I/C Fees
Consolidated
Consolidated without I/C Fees
GAAP Consolidated (special data source)

We use the subset editor to build 'groups' containing our legal entities and have them built for the individual companies, as well as the various consolidated roll-ups.

For Example: I will open the Individual Balance Sheet, double-click on the legal entity to bring up the subset editor, select our 'Active Base Legal' group (for our 25 individual companies), change the date paramaters as needed, then use the TM1 Print Report function. On screen 2 of the print wizard, I highlight the legal entity dimension and the arrow to move it over to the selected window. Then I select the print multiple workbooks box, browse in the network folder on wizard screen 3, and it produces the individual balance sheets for our companies.

I then repeat the process for the other reports.

Sorry if this is too verbose or simplistic, but it is the best way I know to share what I do.

Does that help?

EDIT: I produce the reports and place them in a shared network folder for the end-users.