“Customers have asked for and have been involved in bringing about these step-change improvements to the industry’s leading solution for budgeting, planning, forecasting, consolidations, scorecards, analysis, modeling and reporting,” said Mark Nashman, President & CTO, Clarity Systems. “We’re confident that this announcement will continue to fuel the rapid growth of the firm, enabling us to maintain our lead as the fastest-growing CPM vendor in the world ,” he added.

Powerful New Consolidations Solution
With a brand new financial consolidations engine, CLARITY 7 Consolidations now avoids duplication of data through optimized data storage, dramatically improving processing speeds. Not only does CLARITY 7 Consolidations deliver multi-GAAP/IFRS functionality, multi-currency capabilities, inter-company eliminations, and all of the other capabilities an Office of Finance user would expect in a comprehensive consolidations solution, but it also delivers sophisticated functionality to perform simulations on the consolidation models.

“Users can quickly view the financial impact of changes in ownership structure, hierarchical structure or other changes to the model, without impacting the base scenario. And all of this is delivered in a fully parameter-driven configuration platform, making it very easy to set up to meet the most complex global consolidations requirements,” said Nashman.

Template and Report Design Made Even Easier with CLARITY 7 Studio
An innovative new tool is also being unveiled: CLARITY 7 Studio. Studio makes it even easier for finance department users to take control of the creation and on-going management of sophisticated data entry templates and reports, without having to engage IT support.

Additionally, CLARITY 7 includes extensive capabilities to perform Profitability Modeling and Optimization, including tools to perform what-if modeling and goal seeking. As well, a comprehensive Strategy Management solution complete with strategic planning and initiative/goal management capabilities are included in CLARITY 7, all within this single, unified CPM application.

These enhancements are specifically designed to meet the complex performance management needs of professional services firms. Since the initial launch of Clarity 6 Legal Edition in June 2007, approximately two dozen firms have increased efficiency and flexibility with the software solution. Out-of-the-box, the software is pre-defined to meet most of the specific needs of the industry, ensuring a fast implementation and immediate results.

“Clarity Systems is committed to improving financial processes and providing professional services organizations with clear insight into their corporate performance,” said Paul Hill , COO at Clarity Systems. “Clarity 6 Legal Edition 2.0 reflects our mission to provide professionals with the most comprehensive and innovative solution for improved financial performance in the industry.”

Clarity Systems’ expertise in providing legal vertical solutions is strengthened by its partnership with Thomson Elite , a leading provider of financial and practice management systems to professional services markets worldwide. Clarity 6 Legal Edition 2.0 integrates with Elite Enterprise databases, ensuring seamless integration among legal firms’ financial processes.

“Clarity software helps Thomson Elite ’s customers achieve success in business planning and budgeting as well as business plan management,” said John Callahan, director of product management, Business Intelligence, Thomson Elite. “With Clarity 6 Legal Edition 2.0, we deliver a solution built around legal market best practices that is flexible enough to support a firm’s unique planning and reporting requirements.”

“Clarity Systems offers the only CPM solution with the ability to automate the creation of external financial reports with a secure audit trail, automatic rounding, compliance checklists, workflow, and business rules – within an easy-to-use application,” says Mark Nashman , President, Clarity Systems. “This partnership with EDGARfilings further extends our solution by providing our customers with the ability to electronically file their financial documents with the SEC, in an EDGAR-ready format.”

Clarity FSR is a key component of Clarity 6 – the only web based, unified and open CPM solution available on the market. Now with Clarity 6 and EDGARfilings, organizations have a complete end-to-end solution for the financial close process as well as industry leading capabilities for budgeting, planning, reporting and analysis.

“As the most widely-used EDGAR conversion software, EDGARizer simplifies every step required to convert and transmit EDGAR compliant documents to the SEC,” says Andrew Neblett, CEO, EDGARfilings. “We are truly pleased to have Clarity Systems partner with us to broaden our offering with Clarity FSR software. With compliance and financial reporting requirements being top of mind for companies, adopting software solutions to streamline the process is a high priority. Clarity shares our strategy of developing high quality solutions for customers to simplify this process.”

EDGARfilings is the leading provider of EDGAR filing solutions, serving thousands of financial, legal and corporate clients across the globe since 1993. The company creates easy-to-use software and online applications while also delivering cost effective outsourcing solutions that provide financial professionals greater control, reduced cost and attractive documents compliant with SEC mandates.

As part of the highly functional Clarity 6.1 software solution, the Legal Edition includes sophisticated capabilities such as predefined data models, advanced acquisition forecasting and modeling functionality, business intelligence dashboards, and a complete financial reporting package. These enhancements are specifically designed to meet the complex performance management needs of law and other professional services firms.

“Clarity 6.1 Legal Edition has helped us to organize our budget and allows us to standardize and maintain a common budgeting process,” says Julie Rosenberg, Controller at Hodgson Russ. “Previously when someone had a question about the budget it was a matter of pulling out physical files or pulling up spreadsheets to confirm what the numbers mean and where they came from. Now everything is right at our fingertips. With Clarity, we can breakdown all information by practice area and department to compare budgets to actuals, analyze profitability, and conduct cost analysis.”

Some of the new features in Clarity 6.1 Legal Edition include:

Predefined data models

• Provides pre-defined planning data models that represent best practices of the legal industry
• Offers easy configuration to meet a firm’s specific planning and reporting requirements
• Multi-currency support

Advanced acquisition forecasting and modeling

• Streamlines ‘what-if’ modeling to effortlessly generate financial alternatives using different parameters
• Flexibility to copy, alter data and report variances between multiple versions

Business Intelligence (BI) dashboards

• Designs executive dashboards and supports interactive charts and graphs with Clarity Visualizer
• Creates profitability reports to review a firm’s profitability across practices or clients

Full reporting package

• Comes with a series of out-of-the-box reports including client, timekeeper, analytical and profit and loss reports
• Performs ad-hoc financial analysis and financial statutory reporting
• Includes drill-through capabilities to access supporting details and actual transitions to investigate and understand variances
• Creates and distributes highly formatted financial statements

Clarity Systems’ expertise in providing legal vertical solutions is strengthened by their reseller partnership with Thomson Elite, a leading provider of financial and practice management systems to professional services markets. The Clarity 6.1 Legal Edition solution connects to Elite Enterprise and Elite 3E databases ensuring a legal firm’s budgeting and forecasting processes seamlessly feed into each other.

“Clarity software helps Thomson Elite’s customers in their everyday operations,” said John Callahan, director, market segments at Thomson Elite. “With Clarity 6.1 Legal Edition, we are providing legal firms easy to use planning solutions with intuitive features, helping them remain efficient, capture more hours and spend more time on practicing law.”

“Our knowledge in the operations and management of legal and professional services organizations is evident in the functionality of Clarity 6.1 Legal Edition,” said Paul Hill , COO at Clarity Systems. “The software offers integrated, out-of-the box solutions necessary to ensure the development of effective plans for law firms.”

Driving Harvard Pilgrim’s decision to purchase and implement Clarity 6 was the company’s need for a single web-based suite of integrated solutions to manage, plan and forecast their budget effectively across the organization while leveraging their existing investment in both Oracle and Microsoft Analysis Services (MSAS) databases.

“We are very pleased with the capability of Clarity Systems’ software,” said Charlie Nugent, Manager Cost Allocations and Management reporting at Harvard Pilgrim. “Using Clarity 6 will increase our visibility across the organization and is critical to company performance. What we were interested in was upgrading our spreadsheet budgeting and forecasting processes, using an application that was a single consistent source for tracking and reporting budget performance across Harvard Pilgrim. We are excited about having a single, consistent source for full corporate performance management. Clarity 6 will help us proactively assess and analyze results to facilitate key decisions.”

Looking to establish performance measures to support overall strategy, Harvard Pilgrim also selected Clarity Systems for its unified product, consulting expertise, and ability to execute in a timely and costly fashion. Clarity 6 will act as a central repository for Harvard Pilgrim’s data, ensuring consistency and transparency throughout the organization on its overall performance and action plans.

“Our exceptional professional services team has helped Harvard Pilgrim use Clarity 6’s flexibility to transform the product to fit into their specific business model — and do all this at a reasonable cost,” said Frank Pizzolato , CEO, Clarity Systems. “Our focus has always been on improving financial processes and providing organizations with clear insight into their corporate performance. This latest partnership with Harvard Pilgrim offers them a highly scalable, feature-rich platform through which their organization can better their planning, budgeting, forecasting and reporting methodologies.”

Clarity Systems announced that Southwest Airlines has selected Clarity 6 software as a single integrated solution for corporate planning, budgeting, forecasting and reporting. After evaluating leading corporate performance management software vendors, Southwest Airlines ultimately partnered with Clarity Systems because of its Excel friendly environment and their desire for a web-based, single suite of integrated solutions that will leverage their existing Hyperion Essbase investment and streamline their data entry and consolidation processes.

“With operating revenues of over 9 Billion dollars in a fast paced, highly competitive industry, we needed a better financial solution to control and integrate our current Excel based financial planning and reporting models,” said Spencer Van Ness, Senior Director Financial Planning, Southwest Airlines. “Clarity Systems did a superb job at demonstrating their ability to work with our current operational and data structures. From baseline financial forecasting, to what-if analysis, and ad-hoc reporting, Clarity Systems’ flexibility stood out in satisfying all of our business requirements.”

“Clarity Systems looks forward to growing our relationship with Southwest Airlines,” said Frank Pizzolato, CEO, Clarity Systems. “A leading Fortune 500 customer like Southwest Airlines demands a performance management solution with a proven track record in serving the needs of large, profitable organizations. In providing the industry’s only unified CPM solution, we’re pleased to help Southwest Airlines realize their performance management initiatives and help them meet the growing demands of their business.”

Since implementing the software, AIMCO has expanded their budget, adopted a forecasting system and accelerated the consolidation process with Clarity 6. “There is a level of efficiency we have realized by implementing Clarity 6 and it has allowed us to focus more on the operations rather than the process of getting the numbers where they need to be,” says Brad Mauvais, Project Manager for AIMCO. “The tool is no longer a constraint. All of the data standards are maintained because everyone is entering their information into the same Clarity 6 template. There is more consistency with our data which means we can get our budget out much faster.”

Prior to implementing Clarity 6, creating AIMCO’s yearly budget involved spending three to four days emailing and consolidating spreadsheets from each of its over 1200 properties. It took the company over two weeks to roll the data into the system, and generally they would find segments of their business that were not included in the budget. After implementing Clarity Systems, AIMCO can now consolidate the data into Clarity to create their budget in under two hours.

“Many companies are now enjoying the benefits of corporate performance management, and AIMCO’s budgeting challenges are familiar to companies everywhere,” says Ron Powell, Cofounder and Editorial Director of the Business Intelligence Network. “Using Clarity 6, AIMCO users still have an Excel-based interface, but they receive the benefits of truly unified processes and data consistency,”

The reseller partnership brings key budgeting enhancements to Thomson Elite’s flagship software, including the following:

* Familiar Microsoft® Office Excel look and feel

* Multidimensional OLAP database for powerful analysis and reporting

* Flexibility in interface and report appearance

* Web-based platform for ease of deployment and convenient access to data

* International capabilities such as multiple languages and currencies

* Audit trail to recover previous budget version

“We’re anticipating the business intelligence needs of our clients by leveraging the robust capabilities Clarity Systems delivers,” said John Callahan, director, market segments, Thomson Elite. “With profitability goals becoming increasingly difficult to achieve, today’s firms require the visibility and competitive edge that budgeting, forecasting and reporting tools deliver.”

Additionally, the Thomson Elite and Clarity Systems development teams will work together to create new customization products specifically for legal and other professional services firms.

“We recognize the importance and continued growth of professional services in today’s global economy,” commented Paul Hill, chief operating officer, Clarity Systems. “We handpicked Thomson Elite as a leader in its industry to combine our expertise and achieve our mutual goals in the marketplace.”

Clarity Systems delivers superior corporate performance management software solutions, training, consulting and advisory services for financial budgeting, planning, consolidation and reporting.

“With the launch of Clarity 6, we are setting the standard for CPM solutions. Clarity 6 stands out from the competition by providing budgeting, planning, reporting, modeling, consolidations, and forecasting in a single unified web-based application,” said Mark Nashman, President and CTO, Clarity Systems. “Significantly, Clarity 6 is the only performance management solution that is capable of operating with both Essbase and Microsoft Analysis Services OLAP databases, as well as the most common relational databases, simultaneously. When you add these factors together, Clarity 6 is the leading CPM product.”

Clarity 6’s new Business Process Manager allows administrators to graphically design and display business process flows by role. Business Process Manager delivers instant overall visibility into the planning process while allowing each user to quickly and easily step through specific planning tasks.

The Clarity 6 release includes improved Security Services, enabling distributed webbased security administration. Powerful new features allow administrators the freedom to control, manage, and maintain security from a single interface.

New and existing Clarity Systems customers will benefit from Clarity 6’s Template Builder. With an improved look and feel, the Template Builder is a single tool for authoring both OLAP and relational templates and reports in Excel and one-click publication to the web. Clarity 6 is the only performance management solution offering an open database approach, the benefit of web based deployments, and an ExcelTM look and feel.

An important element in the Clarity 6 release is Cube Manager. Cube Manager provides a graphical environment to manage an organization’s metadata by adding dimensions, defining hierarchies, creating reports, defining member attributes, and saving all changes to a single common repository.

Other key Clarity 6 features include report book enhancements, a new business rule engine, improved system performance, new options within the Workflow module, and the ability to personalize the home page for each user.

“Clarity 6 is the result of close collaboration with our customers across many diverse industries. As a result, Clarity 6 is shipping with features built with our customers’ needs in mind,” said Paul Hill, COO, Clarity Systems, “Importantly, Clarity 6 is backed by expert consultants with decades of experience in the CPM market.”