Financial Information Manager is a powerful financial analysis and reporting system that improves a company's ability to analyze and understand its operations.  Whether your company is a single-point dealership or a mega-dealership group, FIM can greatly simplify your financial and operational reporting.

FIM is not a "canned" one size fits all system.  It is a dynamic, flexible system that is tailored to each client.  This flexibility allows you to collect, manage and report the information you need, in the format that makes the most sense for you.

Key Features of FIM:

• Computer system independent and works with Reynolds, ADP, UCS, and the AS-400 systems.  
• Franchise independent and works equally well with Ford, Chevrolet, Honda, and the others.  
• Stores both financial and non-financial information.
• Can manage dealership and non-dealership information

Most importantly, FIM is an easy-to-use system that allows even novices to create sophisticated financial reports.

Key Benefits of FIM:

• Improves financial and managerial reporting
• Simplifies the budgeting and projection process
• Allows management to identify and focus on operating weaknesses

Multi-Dimensional Database
The key to FIM's power is its multi-dimensional database system.  Six dimensions are use to store, manage, and retrieve the information allowing the user to "slice and dice" the data.  These dimensions are:

• Entity
• Account
• Department
• Period/Year
• Category
• Frequency

Entity - a company, division, or parent company that has financial data or a virtual company that summarizes information from one or more other companies, divisions or parent companies.  Entities can be dealership or non-dealership companies. (go back)

Account - a component of the FIM chart of account that represents the type of data being stored.  Accounts can store financial, non-financial and calculated amounts.  See table below. (go back)

	Type	Example
	Financial	Cash, Receivables, Floorplan Payable, Sales, Cost of Sales
	Non-Financial	Units sold, # of employees, "ups", square footage, # of business days
	Calculated	Gross per unit, Sales per RO, Net to Gross %, Days supply of inventory

The chart of account is 100% customizable.

Department - a component of the FIM chart of account system that stores information for different departments; most dealerships have 4 to 5 operating departments (New, Used, Service, Body, and Parts).  FIM is flexible and allows more (or fewer) departments as needed.  Departments are 100% customizable. (go back)

PeriodYear - is used to identify the period and year that the data represents.  FIM is flexible and accommodates both fiscal-year and calendar-year companies.  There are 12 periods per year. (go back)

Category - indicates the type of information being stored such as Actual, Budget, or Projected.  Categories are 100% customizable. (go back)

Frequency - all data stored within FIM can be retrieved using one of four data frequencies: month, quarter, half-year, and year-to-date. (go back)

Reporting Trees
One key feature of FIM is its ability to combine the information of various entities using reporting trees.  Reporting trees can represent the true legal ownership structure of parent and subsidiary companies or operational structures used by management to understand and report the results such as geography or franchise.  There can be multiple reporting trees, for example:

	By Franchise	By Region

Flexible Reporting
Storing information is important, but reporting and using the information is critical to any information system.  FIM provides two methods of reporting the information:

1. Built-in report writer
2. FinLink to Microsoft Excel

FinLink is a real-time link between FIM and Microsoft Excel that combines the calculation and reporting power of Excel with the data storage power of FIM.  What makes FinLink unique and powerful is its ability to retrieve information from the FIM database on a cell-by-cell basis.  Unlike programs that "dump" data to Excel that in turn has to be sorted, formatted or linked, FinLink allows the user to create simple formulas that pull only the required information from FIM.

FinLink uses many custom formulas that gives the user great flexibility to access the FIM database.  The following are just a few.

	GetEnt	Retrieves the entity's short name
	GetEntity	Retrieves the entity's full name
	GetMonthYear	Returns the calendar month and year based upon the fiscal period and year.
	GetVal	Returns the value for an entity, account, department, period, frequency and category.
	GetAcct	Returns the account name
	GetDepartment	Returns the department full name
	GetDept	Returns the department's short name

System Limits

The FIM system utilizes a power database application that can store vast amounts of data.  The following table indicates the system limits:

	Entities	Unlimited*
	Accounts	Unlimited*
	Departments	Unlimited*
	PeriodYear	Unlimited*
	Categories	Unlimited*
	Frequencies	4

* Limited by available disk space.

Contact us today for additional information.

Sample Reports