Frequently-Asked Questions
What CONTROL® functionality comes as standard? How does user licensing work? What about implementation?
Your questions are answered here.
Architecture
CONTROL® is made up of three components:
- A relational database that stores data and metadata,
- A processing engine that processes user requests and performs calculations,
- A Microsoft® Excel® plug-in for the user interface.
CONTROL® performs all calculations and consolidations “on-the-fly” in real-time. As changes are made to the detail levels of data, users can instantly see the impact at the upper levels.
As global rate or driver are changed, changes cascade on demand to associated models such as P&L, Balance Sheet and Cash flow. As rollups are modified or amended, users see the impact of those changes immediately.
CONTROL® is a single all-inclusive platform. It provides broad, deep and flexible functionality for every aspect of performance management – planning, budgeting, modeling, consolidations, analysis, and reporting – all within one single solution.
You don’t have to worry about keeping multiple modules synchronized, or licensing additional components as your financial and operational needs change and evolve.
CONTROL® is a comprehensive platform with a familiar Excel® interface. It has the built-in flexibility to be tailored to your cross functional organizational wide requirements and seamlessly integrate your financial and operational data.
You are not boxed into a “one size fits all” position, nor do you need to change business process to conform to the CONTROL® software.
There is a one-time licensing fee that varies by license type – administrator, power user, information consumer, or information contributor.
Yes, indeed. You can enter budgets and forecasts offline.
When you re-login to CONTROL®, your inputs are automatically synchronized to the database.
Functionality
Absolutely – and you don’t need a third party tool!
CONTROL® has a built-in, robust ETL that manages the import and export of both data and “structural data” (account lists, rollup structures, etc.).
External relational and non-relational data sources can be accessed dynamically, on-demand, or on a scheduled basis. The ETL will summarize data, detect errors, and produce reconciliations.
The user interface for CONTROL® is Microsoft® Excel®; so you have all the versatility at your fingertips to manipulate, reformat and restructure data.
You don’t need to waste time parsing data and have absolutely no data integrity risk.
CONTROL® has extensive auditing capabilities. Logs are available for changes to any component; changes to structural information, such as, hierarchies; and all changes to data. Audit logs can be enabled, or disabled, selectively and include the ID of the user effecting the change, a timestamp, what was changed, a before and after value, and other optional logging information.
In addition, CONTROL® has a commentary feature that can provide visibility and support for the reasons behind the changes.
Yes. A number of clients use CONTROL® to plan and report individual project performance from both a cost and resource perspective. The level of desired detail is a critical choice. Projects can be tracked in summary, or with detailed work breakdown structures.
Some users have CONTROL® set to track information down to the individual charging employee.
CONTROL® provides full transparency into financial details via its ‘drill-down’ and ‘drill-to-source’ functionality. You can drill down into G/L, AP, and AR transactions without any configuration, scripting or programming.
You get immediate, on-demand transactional information without having to run queries or reports from other systems.
This is standard functionality in CONTROL®. Data can be stored in base or local currency, so you can evaluate the true currency impact on your organization.
In addition, CONTROL® has the ability to store multiple versions of exchange rates, allowing quick and easy modeling and analysis of complex currency sensitivities.
CONTROL® supports an unlimited number of plans, budgets, forecasts, “what-if” versions and allows you to quickly and painlessly create, compare, analyze, and report them.
You are fully empowered to align everyone in support of corporate strategy.
Yes – you can readily create exception conditions via a built-in exceptions utility. Exceptions are defined as logical conditions on the data (e.g. Expenses > 1000). When conditions are met, data can be uniquely formatted for razor focus and action or suppressed, shown, or rejected for submission.
Any number of exceptions can be defined, and the exceptions can be selectively activated or turned off.
Yes – and no programming skills are required!
You have total flexibility and full control over the content, level of detail, layout and formatting. With a few mouse clicks you can dynamically report on any period at any level, slice, dice, nest and graph layers of data, compare budgets, forecasts, and actuals, assess dollar and percent variances between versions, and navigate from the highest level down to the lowest level of detail and through to the underlying data source.
Access to the data in the reports is automatically controlled by user security privileges.
Deployment
CONTROL® can run on Apple® iOS® via the Citrix® App.
CONTROL® can be deployed on premise giving you full control over your environment.
Alternatively, it can be hosted in the Microsoft® Azure® cloud, with all technical responsibility handled by KCI.
Yes. CONTROL® works with both Microsoft® Windows® Hyper V® and VMware®.
User accounts are managed through the CONTROL® application. However, they can be OS-authenticated via Microsoft Active Directory enabling user passwords to be derived from their network user ID, and a single sign-on (SSO) for the end user.
Implementation
The implementation options are flexible as our software. Implementations can be:
- Turnkey, where we handle all aspects from process assessment to rollout;
- Collaborative, where responsibilities are shared with you;
- Supervisory, where we train your staff and provide guidance – on request – as the implementation progresses.
The implementation team consists exclusively of our own personnel.
We don’t outsource, or subcontract implementation services to third-parties. This allows us to directly link the buying process to the implementation process, keep “skin in the game”, and provide you a single point of accountability for both the software and implementation.
Implementation times vary depending upon the scope and complexity of the requirements, number of data sources, and the number of users.
In general, implementations range from a few days to a few weeks. Once we have a better understanding of your needs and the role you want to play in the implementation, we can provide you with a clearer deployment timeline.
CONTROL® is designed to be owned and managed by finance and operational personnel, rather than IT specialists. The skills required are an understanding of your business goals, subject area, methodologies, and processes, as well as, basic Excel® skills.
We train and empower you to build and maintain models, hierarchies, formulas; create new scenarios; integrate information from external data sources; and create your own standard and ad-hoc reports.
Yes. CONTROL® comes with sample applications for common financial functions which can be used directly, tweaked or used as examples.
In addition, CONTROL® includes a comprehensive suite of commonly used financial reporting formats to enable rapid report deployment, end user adoption and effectiveness.