The company's new software system also makes it easy to produce an instant corporatewide summary of the budgets for every individual shopping center in the company's portfolio, or a customized cross-section of the budgets for those centers. "Due to the size, complexity, and large number of Excel files being used, the easiest way to summarize the portfolio in the past was to take each individual center's Excel files and manually type into a summary Excel file the main components of the individual center's files," Blum says. "Each time an analyst made a change to an individual Excel file, the summary file would need to be updated manually. This meant constant reconciliations between the summary file and the individual files."
Blum says the new software system has also transformed the process of loading budget numbers into the company's general ledger system into a 10-minute job from one that had been extremely time-consuming. In part, this is because finance can download a file from the new system in the exact format the company's general ledger requires. The previous system required manually preparing an import file for the general ledger system from the Excel files for all of the company's individual shopping centers. Thanks to the enhanced capabilities of its new performance management system, Blum says, Taubman Centers now updates its budget as many as five times a year rather than just once.
This article is excerpted and adapted from What CFOs Want from Performance Management Services, a report that summarizes the findings of a mail survey of 245 senior financial executives and telephone interviews with 14 more. Comshare, a provider of software that helps companies implement and execute strategy, funded the research and the publication of the findings; CFO Research Services produced the final report. You may download a copy of the full report by filling out a brief form.
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