PerformancePoint Planning Delivers Financial Tools

PerformancePoint Server 2007 introduces a component called Planning, a set of tools and services intended to solve many of the problems large organizations face with financial planning and reporting processes (such as budgeting and year-end financial consolidation). PerformancePoint Planning supports centralized control of financial data using SQL Server Analysis Services databases, which could reduce the data consistency problems that are common in ad hoc processes. Furthermore, PerformancePoint Server provides tools that allow business analysts to define and manage financial data with minimal assistance from IT workers or database experts, and an add-in for Excel lets others work with financial data (inputting detailed budget requests or generating financial reports, for instance) using Microsoft’s familiar spreadsheet application.

(For an overview of PerformancePoint Planning’s architecture, see the illustration “PerformancePoint Planning Architecture“.)