Corporate Planning Corporate Planner

CP Corporate Planning (CP) is a software vendor and consulting firm based in Hamburg, Germany. The company was founded in 1989 and currently employs 120 people. CP has offices in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the UK. In 2021, the company was acquired by Proalpha, a global ERP provider focused on SMEs in manufacturing, wholesale, and other industries. Proalpha employs over 2,500 people worldwide and has more than 17,500 customers using 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 share a common UI and are based on a three-tier architecture consisting of an integrated relational database in Microsoft SQL Server, application server, and front ends. 2,000 customers use the various modules of Corporate Planner, most of them in the DACH region. Corporate Planner and its individual modules are available in the Microsoft Azure cloud and on premises. 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 Reporting Studio as a standalone product for management reporting according to standards such as IBCS as well as customer-specific standards.

Corporate Planner is targeted at business departments, especially finance and controlling. The solution can be deployed as a single desktop application or as an enterprise CPM solution integrating multiple departments or companies within a group. It can be used with the Proalpha ERP suite or as a standalone application with non-Proalpha applications. Over 95 percent of customers use the product without Proalpha as a source system.

Corporate Planner’s strengths include no-code customization and wizard-driven configuration, enabling a high level of business self-service without the need for 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 provides centralized top-down planning, decentralized bottom-up planning, and a combination of both approaches. All types of planning models can be flexibly set up with Corporate Planner. The vendor does not specialize in any specific planning topic (e.g., finance, sales, HR, etc.) or industry but offers preconfigured models and templates to speed up implementation. New AI-based apps focusing on trend calculation for predictive time series forecasting, anomaly detection, and automatic account allocation (e.g., of ERP accounts to the CP data model) are scheduled for release in 2026.

Corporate Planner supports the consolidation of actual and plan data for financial consolidation and group financial statements in compliance with all relevant accounting standards (e.g., HGB and IAS/IFRS). It is tightly integrated with the platform’s financial planning model.

In addition to planning and consolidation capabilities, Corporate Planner offers standard and ad hoc reporting with various report types and simplified options for displaying and navigating data. It also provides a library of predefined business analyses that users can run directly on existing data. For more advanced graphical display of data, Reporting Studio’s extensive chart library is integrated into Corporate Planner’s web client to visualize data in an IBCS-compliant manner. A template library supports users in selecting the right visualization for their data. For dashboarding and advanced analysis requirements, CP pursues a ‘bring your own BI’ strategy. Qlik Sense and Microsoft Power BI can be integrated into the web client to display dashboards and analyses created with these third-party products. Furthermore, CP offers extensions for Microsoft Power BI and Qlik Sense to visualize IBCS-compliant dashboards. In both cases, Corporate Planner data is made available via an interface, which can also be used to export data to separate databases for general third-party access.