Corporate Planning Corporate Planner

CP Corporate Planning (CP) is a software vendor and consultancy based in Hamburg, Germany. The company was founded in 1989 and currently has 110 employees. CP has offices in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. In 2021, CP was acquired by proALPHA, a globally active ERP provider focused on SMEs in manufacturing, wholesale and other sectors. proALPHA employs over 2,300 people worldwide and 9,700 customers use its software.

CP offers Corporate Planner, an integrated solution for operational management, financial planning, sales management, financial consolidation, HR management and management reporting. All modules have a common UI and are based on an integrated database in Microsoft SQL Server. More than 1,650 customers use various modules of Corporate Planner, the majority of whom are located in the DACH region. Corporate Planner and its individual modules are available on premises and in the Microsoft Azure cloud. In 2020, CP acquired Hi-Chart and has integrated its comprehensive reporting and visualization capabilities into Corporate Planner. However, it will also continue to market Hi-Chart as a standalone product for management reporting compliant with standards such as IBCS as well as customer-specific standards.

Corporate Planner is targeted at business departments, especially the finance and controlling department. The solution can be deployed as a single desktop application and as an enterprise solution for CPM integrating multiple departments or companies within a group. Across its entire customer base, Corporate Planner is used by an average of 10+ users per installation, but it also supports installations with significantly larger numbers of users.

Corporate Planner’s strengths include no-code customization and configuration via wizards that enable a high level of business self-service without consulting support. It has comprehensive, out-of-the-box planning functionality and predefined reports and analyses that support business power users in a variety of tasks. The product supports centralized top-down planning, decentralized bottom-up planning as well as a combination of both approaches. All types of planning models can be set up very flexibly with Corporate Planner. The vendor does not focus on any one particular planning topic (e.g., financials, sales, HR, etc.) or industry.

For financial consolidation and close at group level (IDW PS 880 certified) in compliance with all the relevant accounting standards (e.g., HGB and IAS/IFRS), Corporate Planner Cons supports the consolidation of actuals as well as plan data.

Besides its CPM capabilities, Corporate Planner offers standard and ad hoc reporting with various report types and simpler options for the display of and navigation in data. Moreover, a library of predefined business analyses is available, which users can run directly on existing data. For more advanced graphical display of data, Hi-Chart’s comprehensive chart library is integrated in Corporate Planner’s Reporting Studio in the web client to visualize data in an IBCS-compliant way. An extensive template library supports users in selecting the right visualization for data. For dashboarding and more advanced analytics requirements, CP follows a ‘bring your own BI’ strategy. A strategic partnership with Qlik means that the Qlik Sense web client is fully integrated in Corporate Planner’s web client to display dashboards and analyses created with the Qlik product. Predefined dashboard templates are available (e.g., for finance, HR, etc.). However, Microsoft Power BI is also integrated in Corporate Planner’s web client to display and select charts. And for general third-party access to Corporate Planner data, the product’s ‘Connectivity BI’ can be used to export data into separate databases.