Consolidation and planning (EPM)
Where the group result is assembled and where the plan lives: consolidation, eliminations, currency translation, budget and forecast.
01 What it holds
The data inside it
Reporting hierarchies, intercompany pairs, FX rates, adjustment journals, and the budget and forecast versions the business is actually managed against.
Entity, Account, Scenario, Version, Period, Currency, Consolidation journal, Intercompany transaction
02 Getting the data out
Extraction, and the keys that decide whether it joins
Most EPM tools expose their own extract and REST APIs, and hold data in a dimensional cube rather than a relational model. The dimensionality is the value; flattening it carelessly destroys the hierarchy the numbers mean something in.
Entity and account hierarchies are versioned by scenario and period. An extract that ignores scenario mixes actuals with a forecast, which is the most dangerous silent error in this dictionary.
03 What goes wrong
The failures that look like success
Each of these produces a number that is plausible, reconciles to something, and is wrong. They are worth reading before the first extract, not after the first dispute.
Scenario and version confusion
Actual, budget, forecast v3 and a what-if all live in the same cube. Any extract must pin scenario and version explicitly.
Adjustments live only here
Top-side journals and eliminations often exist in EPM and nowhere else, so an ERP-only view will never tie to the published result.
Hierarchies change between periods
A reorganisation restates the tree. Comparing periods without effective-dated hierarchy produces a variance that is pure structure.
Budget phasing is a modelling choice
How an annual plan was spread across twelve months determines every monthly variance downstream, and it is rarely documented.
04 Joins that matter
What this system is worth joining to
| Join to | What it lets you answer |
|---|---|
| ERP | actuals to plan, at a grain the plan was built at |
| HRIS | headcount plan against actual establishment |
| Data platform | to publish one governed version of budget variance |
05 Metrics it feeds
The numbers that come out of it
06 Questions
Frequently asked
Should budget variance be calculated in EPM or the data platform?
The definition should be governed once and consumed everywhere. In practice the plan lives in EPM and the actual in ERP, so the join — and therefore the metric — belongs in the platform, reading both.
Why do EPM and ERP totals disagree?
Almost always top-side adjustments, eliminations or a different hierarchy version. The reconciliation should be a reported, explained number rather than a monthly investigation.
Connect this system without replacing it
SCIKIQ reads it in place, resolves the entities inside it and governs what the fields mean.