Actuate Debuts Financial-Performance-Management App

Actuate Corp. on Monday began shipping Actuate Financial Performance Management, a new application that integrates data from disparate financial, human-resources, budgeting, and forecasting systems for reporting and analysis.

The software, built on Actuate's iServer platform, can be used to build financial reporting applications for such areas as sales management, customer intelligence, and supply-chain management, according to the company.

The package also includes a report library with reports for revenue and expense management, head count, and cost-center process control, and connectors for extracting data from databases such as Oracle and IBM DB2 and operational applications from SAP and PeopleSoft.

York University in Toronto already uses Actuate's reporting software to provide financial reports to some 1,500 employees and managers, who use the reports to send budget and spending forecast data back to finance managers. The university is reviewing Actuate's new application. Steve Dewar, its financial reporting director, says the app's ability to create an audit trail of back-and-forth communications could be a major benefit for the school.

Aside from the general need to improve their financial-management processes, businesses are under pressure to improve their visibility into those processes as they try to comply with federal financial-reporting regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Business-intelligence software vendors such as Cognos Inc. and Hyperion Solutions Corp. have been expanding into financial-performance management in recent years. Cognos, for example, moved into the performance-management space with its $157 million acquisition of Adaytum Inc. in 2003. Last month SRC Software Inc., which also develops financial-performance-management software, released a performance-management app targeting the property and casualty insurance industry.

Actuate Financial Performance Management is available now. It's priced at $150,000 for a 50-user license or $560,000 for a 500-user license.