Spring 2020 Release – Improve AI Insights

I’m happy to announce that on May 23, the Prophix Spring 2020 release went into full bloom. It’s true – April showers do bring May Flowers. Over the past couple of months, our product team has been hard at work on exciting new features and enhancements to Prophix. But before we get to that, we realize that this is a difficult time for many, as we struggle to adjust to changes in our routines and ways of life. From our family to yours, we sincerely hope you are doing well and wish you good health, spirit, and prosperity. Our Spring 2020 release is primarily focused on improving the usability, file management capabilities, and overall efficiency of Prophix. With the new functionality you can:

• Leverage Natural Language Processing (NLP) to generate a narrative around your data with Contribution Insights
• Get notifications in all languages as part of enhancements to our Notifications Hub
• Easily navigate to recent files in Document Explorer
• Improve integrations and security with Data Integration Services
• Utilize donut charts to display your data
• Understand your data more easily with improved Dashboard usability
• Enhance your consolidation and close with Journals Manager, which now supports all dimensions

These core improvements have refined the user experience and make navigating Prophix easier and more intuitive.

Contribution Insights

There is an adage that says, “a picture speaks a thousand words,” and in finance, this is true for charts. At Prophix, we believe that dashboards and charts are an important part of the finance story. Finance dashboards are chock-full of data and insights, but for those outside finance, it can be hard to understand what they are trying to say. This is where the Prophix Insights shines, bridging the gap between people and technology by enhancing the user experience, and creating a level playing field. Insights leverages the power of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to combine data and analysis, creating a standardized narrative that is accessible to all your stakeholders. In the summer of 2019, we released Chart Insights, which creates a narrative around your dashboard visuals. For example, if your chart indicates a negative revenue variance between your actuals and budget, Chart Insights would highlight which territory, product line, or customer underperformed relative to the others. In this release, we introduced Contribution Insights, which utilizes comparative analysis to highlight variances between time periods and versions. For instance, Contribution Insights can identify which divisions drove profits this quarter, or which OpEx items are the largest contributors to variances this month. Our Insights functionality is always evolving to help our users embrace the future of FP&A – a future that focuses on intelligent learning, visuals, and automation.

Virtual Financial Analyst

A recent survey by Gartner, a leading industry analyst firm, identified that the priority for finance leaders in 2020 will be analytics and optimization. [1] We’re dedicated to supporting these priorities with our Virtual Financial Analyst (VFA), which gives you deeper insights into the mechanics of your business. Our VFA can help you comb through massive amounts of data, highlight anomalies, optimize your processes, and reduce your chance of mistakes. Furthermore, it can highlight performance issues, giving you time to enact countermeasures and resolve issues with the assistance of Insights. The Virtual Financial Analyst can also surface risky transactions in your general ledger, helping you minimize losses, prevent fraud, and dramatically speed up your internal audits, account reconciliations, consolidations and close with Anomaly Detection. In addition, many CFOs have concluded that if they could eliminate their team’s redundant tasks, they would be able to free up over 30% of their time to do more important work.[2] Task Assistant is the voice-enabled communications assistant to the VFA and is the easiest way to engage with Prophix more naturally. It can perform repetitive tasks, automate routine processes, and simplify the distribution of documents – simply by asking. The goal of the VFA suite of functionality is to automate tedious tasks, provide insights, run processes, and identify anomalies, enabling you to make better business decisions, save time, and focus on more strategic initiatives. We’ve made great strides in achieving this goal, and you can be assured that with every release, we’re getting closer to this reality.

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[1] https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner-top-priorities-for-finance-leaders-in-2020/ [2] https://www.cfodive.com/news/rpa-can-save-finance-teams-25k-working-hours-study-claims/564323/