What is HFM | Complete Hyperion Financial Management Tutorial (2024)

Many finance professionals are faced with the onerous task of combining their businesses' financial and operating statistics using worksheets that are tough to manage and audit. Some are constrained by specialized reporting solutions that are incapable of scaling or meeting challenging demands, while others rely on general ledger-based techniques that are incapable of extracting data from multiple transaction processing systems without considerable IT assistance. The answer to this instantaneous and unified picture of operational and financial results is a combination of different systems known as HFM.

Organizations can enhance their aggregation and reporting processes and mitigate internal control risks by implementing Oracle Hyperion Financial Management; a component of Oracle's Hyperion Financial Close Solution.

What is HFM?

Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) from Oracle is a cloud-based financial consolidation, analysis, and monitoring application. It enables financial stakeholders to quickly complete and publish financial outcomes, comply with worldwide regulatory standards, decrease compliance costs, and instill trust in the statistics. This is accomplished through the use of a unified, highly flexible software solution that is intended to be controlled and managed by the enterprise's finance department.

While HFM is among the most straightforward and powerful tools for Financial Aggregation and Accounting in the marketplace, it also features a very flexible paradigm that allows it to adapt to an ever-changing scenario. It enables finance managers to transition from statisticians to business partners, providing financial as well as non-analysis to aid in operational and strategic decision-making.

HFM's purpose-built features assist organizations in complying with the many and demanding regulatory reporting requirements.

If you want to enrich your career in Business Intelligence & Analytics domain, then visit Mindmajix - A Global online training platform: “Hyperion Financial Management Online Training” Course. This course will help you to achieve excellence in this domain.

What is the difference between HFM and FCCS?

Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) and Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud Services (FCCS) are two of the most successful commercially accessible Corporate Performance Management systems, both of which are marketed and maintained by Oracle. Let us explore the differences between them.

1. Customization

HFM is simply a white canvas. Applications may be extensively customized and tailored to the needs of large or small businesses. Scalable database schema and structures can handle simple or complicated business requirements.

While FCCS allows for some modification, it is designed to benefit those prepared to conform to out-of-the-box capabilities based on Oracle's analysis into "best practices."

2. Management of Data

The majority of HFM data is imported via FDMEE. FDMEE supports programming, drill back, and connectivity adapters for data sources.

FCCS includes data management that is quite comparable to FDMEE or HFM's data management, but with restricted scripting capabilities. Additionally, data may be imported through data forms. Drill-down features are provided for both Cloud ERP and files.

3. Reporting

HFM does not include predefined financial reports; instead, reports must be customized to the client's specifications.

FCCS has pre-designed accounting reports and visualizations that may be customized to meet specific customer requirements.

4. Multiple Applications

HFM enables the creation of numerous applications inside the same ecosystem.

FCCS does not support the creation of numerous applications inside the same environment. A distinct module will be necessary for each application.

5. Backend Database

Because HFM is built on relational databases, dimension changes will have little influence on the time required to reorganize.

FCCS is based on the Essbase database management system. Account modifications take longer to reorganize in bigger datasets. The compact dimension is mostly taken into consideration.

How does HFM work?

Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) is developed on a SQL database management framework and will accept information and statistics from every source via ETL tools, data extraction tools, confined text, or direct input. Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) leverages sophisticated sub-cube processing techniques to efficiently and quickly process, aggregate, and summarize your data, ensuring accurate financials and immediate access to your reports.

Furthermore, the relational repository enables HFM to gather the textual data necessary for a coherent understanding of the financial results. As with all Hyperion products, HFM includes a Microsoft Office add-on that enables users to enter, organize, and publish information in Word or Excel, an environment familiar to the majority of financial users.

Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) integrates seamlessly with other Hyperion products, including Hyperion Planner and Essbase, allowing for data sharing between programs. This enables your organization to invest additional time evaluating your business, rather than merely reporting on it.

Key Benefits of HFM

• Increase the speed of reporting - Accelerate data aggregation, automate eliminations, shorten close cycle durations, and provide findings more quickly.
• Reduce compliance costs - Easily offer multi-GAAP, multi-currency analysis and boost financial trust by minimizing control concerns
• Conduct a strategic analysis - Reduce time spent on processing and increase time spent on value-added analytics
• Provide a solitary truth - Offer a centralized source of truth for money management and regulatory reporting
• Integrate easily - Connect with source general ledgers, human resource management systems, sales management systems, spreadsheets, and several other data source systems.
• Integrating with Microsoft Office - Utilize Smart View in Excel Spreadsheets to analyze, integrate, alter, export, and share data.

Key Features of HFM

1. Easily Acquire In-Depth Operational Insights

Organizations may integrate financial and non-financial data using Oracle HFM to have a better understanding of performance indicators. Consolidated data may be analyzed across an endless number of user-defined parameters, including product, branding, and consumer.

2. Control Risk Is Reduced With Comprehensive Audit Trails

Oracle HFM mitigates "control risk" by providing comprehensive audit trails, enabling businesses to have confidence in their financial statements. Intercompany balances are linked and removed, foreign currency is computed appropriately in line with local GAAP or IFRS standards and financial statements are generated automatically.

3. Manage Diverse Scenarios

HFM enables users to aggregate and analyze all annual operations, forecasts, and plans dynamically. Then, when assumptions and facts evolve, they may simply and rapidly generate new assertions and perspectives on the outcomes.

4. Comparing Intercompany Transactions

HFM contains a module for matching intercompany transactions. The module enables fast identification, reconciliation, and reporting of intercompany account discrepancies at the transactional, or invoice level.

5. Web-Based Architecture Enables Access from Anywhere

Oracle HFM Web-based design enables users to enter, integrate, and retrieve global financial data quickly, conveniently, and safely from any place using a normal browser.

6. Utilize Mobile Devices to Access Data

With today's hectic lifestyles, customers want the ability to obtain data from a number of sources. Apart from typical PC access, HFM data may be accessible via portable devices like phones and tablets, enabling access at any time.

Explore Hyperion Financial Management Interview Questions that help you grab high-paying jobs.

Stages of Automation in HFM

HFM includes a tool called "Task Flow" that assists in automating basic HFM operations like data loads, data extraction, consolidations, and computations. However, if you've used Task Flows in HFM, you're probably aware that it is not the best user-friendly EPM application available. Setting up and administering these job flows is time-consuming.

One of its most significant shortcomings is that the inbuilt Task Flow scheduler is ineffective. Oracle Support is presently investigating a problem with a regular HFM Task Flow that bypasses intermittent instances. This is a significant worry, as any amount of automation is impossible to perform without a fully working scheduler.

The Java Heap Analysis Tool (JHAT) is a tool for automating HFM activities. This automation is accomplished through the use of Windows batch programming and the HFM API. Because JHAT is a batch script, it may be used with any scheduler such as Windows Task Manager to automate HFM chores. This increases scheduling flexibility and eliminates the need to utilize the problematic Task Flow scheduler.

Conclusion

We hope that this article has been able to clearly provide an answer to the earlier question ‘What is HFM?’. We would like to conclude by saying that HFM is a solution that enables your team to focus on forward-thinking activities and less on verifying and double-verifying real outcomes. HFM delivers industry-leading technology, yet it is designed for finance teams to own and operate.