About The Financial Consolidation Survey

The world's largest survey on financial consolidation. Find out what 531 users think about financial consolidation products and which developments are shaping the financial consolidation world.

The Financial Consolidation Survey – a new research study from BARC – delves into the financial consolidation tools market. The basis of the study is a global survey of 531 software users, offering extensive user feedback on 9 of the leading financial consolidation solutions on the market today.

Participants were asked about the selection and purchase of their software as well as a range of questions about deployment and utilization. The survey also addresses the success of software projects, product usability and challenges faced.

531

Respondents

35

Countries

9

Financial ConsolidationProducts

1

Year

Components of The Planning Survey

The findings from The Financial Consolidation Survey are presented in multiple documents, including The Results and Vendor Performance Summaries. These documents can be read independently.

BARC also provides the raw data via a web-based tool – The Financial Consolidation Survey Analyzer – enabling users to carry out their own analysis of the survey results.

The Results

An overview and analysis of the most important product-related findings and topical results from The Financial Consolidation Survey.

The Analyzer

Our powerful interactive online tool, enabling you to perform your own custom analysis of the full survey data set.

Discover the Analyzer

Vendor Performance Summary

A series of executive reports on each product featured in The Financial Consolidation Survey. Each report contains a vendor and product overview by BARC’s analyst team plus all the relevant product-related results from The Financial Consolidation Survey.

Sample & Methodology

The strength of The Financial Consolidation Survey lies in its extensive and globally distributed sample of 531 participants, making it one of the largest independent surveys in the world on this subject. This section provides insights into the characteristics of study participants, such as company type, size and industry sector.

Our data cleansing rules are thorough and involve a number of different tests. All fraudulent or suspect data that purports to be from genuine financial consolidation software users is removed.

About The Financial Consolidation Survey

Sample size and make-up

The survey gathered responses from a diverse group, reaching out to many thousands of individuals through various media channels.

The table displays a summary of participants, with removed responses due to various reasons.

Rigorous data cleansing procedures eliminate fraudulent or suspicious submissions from people purporting to be financial consolidation software users.

The number of responses is divided between users, consultants and vendors. Vendors answered a different set of questions to those answered by users (and consultants answering on behalf of users).

Responses removed from the samples Responses
Total responses 531
Removed during data cleansing 98
Total answering questions 433
Total responses analyzed Responses
Users 289
Consultants 63
All users 352
Vendors/Resellers 38

Organization sizes by headcount

Financial consolidation products are predominantly used by mid-sized and large organizations. The majority of responses came from companies with over 100 employees.

Smaller companies (with less than 100 employees) constituted the smallest participant group, contributing to 6% of the total responses.

Company size Financial Consolidation Survey 24
Frequency of employee count in respondent organization (n= 433)

Vertical markets

The breakdown of survey responses by industry sector, focusing on users and consultants answering product-related questions, is depicted in the chart.

Manufacturing is the most heavily represented industry with 31% of the sample, followed by services at 13%.

Industries Financial Consolidation Survey 24
Respondents analyzed by industry (n=433)

Products in The Financial Consolidation Survey

A detailed analysis is conducted on nine financial consolidation tools, meeting the inclusion threshold of at least 18 user reviews each. For ease of reference, the product names used in The Financial Consolidation Survey may be abbreviated and might not always align with the official names provided by the vendors at the time of publication.

Respondents were explicitly asked about their experiences with products from a predefined list, with the option to nominate alternatives. Instances where respondents claimed to use an ‘other’ product, yet it became evident from the context that they were actually using one of the listed products, led to the reclassification of their data.

The table on the right shows the financial consolidation products subjected to our in-depth analysis.

The KPIs

The KPIs are designed to help the reader spot winners and losers in The Financial Consolidation Survey 24 using well-designed dashboards packed with concise information. There is a set of 25 normalized KPIs (which we refer to as ‘root’ KPIs) and 5 aggregated KPIs for each of the 9 products.

The KPIs all follow these simple rules:

  • Only measures that have a clear good/bad trend are used as the basis for KPIs.
  • KPIs may be based on one or more measures from The Financial Consolidation Survey.
  • Only products with samples of at least 15 – 20 (depending on the KPI) for each of the questions that feeds into the KPI are included.
  • For quantitative data, KPIs are converted to a scale of 1 to 10 (worst to best).
  • A linear min-max transformation is applied, which preserves the order of, and the relative distance between, products‘ scores.
  • In some instances, adjustments are made to account for extreme outliers.

KPIs are only calculated if the samples have at least 15 – 20 data points (this varies depending on the KPI) and if the KPI in question is applicable to a product. Therefore some products do not have a full set of root KPIs.

Aggregated KPIs Root KPIs
Business Value Business Benefits
Project Success
Project Length
Competitiveness Considered for Purchase
Competitive Win Rate
Customer Satisfaction Product Satisfaction
Vendor Support
Implementer Support
Price to Value
Recommendation
Sales Experience
Functionality Modeling Flexibility
Predefined Connectors
Data Entry/Upload
Currency Management
Workflow
Intercompany Reconciliation
Consolidation Functionality
Traceability/Auditabality
Financial Reporting/Disclosure Mgmt
Financial Planning
User Experience Self-Service
Ease of Use
Performance Satisfaction
Innovation Cloud-Based Consolidation
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