Variance Analysis and Commentary using TM1

Do you use TM1/Planning Analytics for management reporting? If you don’t, maybe you should think about using it, at least for variance analysis and collecting commentary.

Variance Analysis

Here is a great, short, video from Guy Jones, the Global Tech Sales Lead for TM1 at IBM. No, it’s not a sales vid! Rather it just shows really easily how you can use Planning Analytics for variance reporting and then commentary on those variances.

Planning Accounts

When you do variance reporting and collect commentary, think about using Planning Accounts. When you do this, you are presenting about 15 or 20 accounts for consideration, rather than every GL account. You can always drill down to the GL account level of detail to see what is summarised into a Planning Account. Try not force analysis for analysis sake by forcing people to do variance analysis on every GL account!