Phocas BI and financial planning platform

What is Phocas BI and financial planning platform?

Platform focused on analytics, financial statements and budgets & forecasts, specifically interesting for distribution, manufacturing and retail industries.

• Business Intelligence & Analytics

• Corporate Performance Management

Number of reviews: 26

Customer Satisfaction

7.3

★★★★★★★★★★ 7.3/10

User Experience

6.7

★★★★★★★★★★ 6.7/10

Functionality

6.5

★★★★★★★★★★ 6.5/10

Business Value

6.1

★★★★★★★★★★ 6.1/10

About Phocas BI and financial planning platform

Self-description of the vendor

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Phocas BI and financial planning platform BARC Review & Rating

Provider and product description

Phocas was founded in 2001 and started as a business intelligence (BI) company offering software and professional services. The vendor is headquartered in Sydney, Australia and has additional offices in Australia, New Zealand, the United States and the United Kingdom. Phocas has a workforce of 300 employees and serves more than 2,700 customers worldwide (predominately in the United States, the United Kingdom and the Asia-Pacific region).

The Phocas platform is focused on mid-market organizations, typically in manufacturing, wholesale distribution and retail. It provides comprehensive capabilities for BI and analytics, budgeting and forecasting, financial reporting and analysis. The product portfolio includes four main products: Analytics, Budgets and Forecasts, Financial Statements and Rebates. Phocas Analytics is the core product and foundation layer of the platform focused on comprehensive ad hoc query, reporting and dashboards. Budgets and Forecasts is a planning, budgeting and forecasting platform for business users. Budgets and actuals are published with a click into Phocas Analytics for analysis. Financial Statements helps finance teams to prepare financial statements and reports. Rebates is built on top of Phocas Analytics for analyzing performance, profit and margin. All these products are integrated with each other and can be used in different combinations. They are directly and indirectly sold in their target markets through various channels.

Budgets and Forecasts was launched in 2020 and is used by approximately 15 percent of Phocas customers. Users can create both financial and operational planning applications including sales planning, demand planning, headcount planning and financial planning. The product is essentially a flexible development environment for business users to create individual planning applications, which are typically used in addition to Phocas’ BI and analytics capabilities. Budgets and Forecasts does not contain prebuilt planning solutions or content. Templates are created during the implementation project together with the customer and can be customized by business users to suit their needs. Forecasts can be created from budget models with a configurable mix of actual and forecast periods. Within the planning process, workflow features allow users to collaborate simultaneously on various parts of the budget or forecast. Commenting functionality is available, to add comments to individual cells.

Phocas is a SaaS cloud offering hosted through Amazon Web Services that can be accessed via popular HTML5-compliant web browsers. Data is stored in relational and multidimensional databases. Databases technologies are selected for performance, security and functionality by Phocas. Data integration functionality is provided by the vendor itself with a library of over 150 predefined connectors. Phocas’ consulting teams can help customers to set up data integration from source systems.

Strengths and challenges of Phocas BI and financial planning platform

BARC’s viewpoint on the product’s strengths and challenges.

Strengths

Comprehensive cloud-based platform for BI and analytics, budgeting and forecasting, financial reporting and analysis.
Flexible platform for business users to create individual planning, budgeting and forecasting applications, typically used in addition to Phocas’ BI and analytics capabilities.
Extensive library of over 150 predefined connectors to ERPs typically used by manufacturing, wholesale distribution and retail businesses.
Survey feedback reveals a high level of customer satisfaction with the vendor’s support services, the product itself and its reporting/analysis capabilities in particular.

Challenges

Cloud-only – Phocas is purely cloud-based and not available on premises. Web access is essential to use the product (except for offline planning using Excel templates).
Phocas is a BI and analytics platform with supplementary planning and forecasting capabilities. Compared to market-leading planning products, Phocas has a comparably low level of prefabrication for planning use cases. It does contain some prebuilt planning solutions and content. Planning implementations are typically tailored to each customer’s requirements during the project.
No Excel add-in with write-back capabilities available. Only export of data to and import of data from Excel is supported.
Phocas is new to the planning space and lacks the market presence and global visibility of its main competitors today. Almost all of Phocas’ business is in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia in the manufacturing, wholesale distribution and retail sectors. Prospects outside these regions and sectors should evaluate the vendor’s and partners’ local consulting and support capabilities.

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Phocas BI and financial planning platform User Reviews & Experiences

The information contained in this section is based on user feedback and actual experience with Phocas BI and financial planning platform.

The information and figures are largely drawn from BARC’s The BI & Analytics Survey, The Planning Survey, The Financial Consolidation Survey and The Data Management Survey. You can find out more about these surveys by clicking on the relevant links.

Who uses Phocas BI and financial planning platform in a planning context and how

Product usage (planning)

Product usage (besides planning)

Company size

Number of users

Percentage of users

Why users buy Phocas BI and financial planning platform and what problems they have using it

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Full user reviews and KPI results for Phocas BI and financial planning platform

All key figures for Phocas BI and financial planning platform at a glance.

Premium content. Unlock with BARC+.

For just €79 per month (€948 per year) you can access all the paid content on www.barc.com.

Your benefits:

Get independent information on software solutions, market developments and trends in data, analytics, business intelligence, data science and corporate performance management.
Make data & analytics decisions based on numbers, data, facts and expert knowledge
Access to all premium articles and all our research, including all software comparison studies, scores and surveys.
Unlimited access to the BARC media library
Consume unlimited content anywhere

Individual user reviews for Phocas BI and financial planning platform

Role

Head of business department

Number of employees

Less than 100

Industry

Retail

Source

Invited by the vendor, The Planning Survey 24, 04/2024

What do you like best?

Ability to utilize data from ERP system to bridge financial and operational reporting. In person assistance is usually very good. It is clear that if you live in the Phocas world all the time it offers significant flexibility and performance, but requires nuanced knowledge of the context, tools and data construction to create those results.

What do you like least/what could be improved?

Documentation appears to often be outdated. Error messages provide no guidance resolve issues. Training is generally task driven rather than explaining context and design considerations for planning components. User interface needs to be relearned each year as tool tips are rare, context often determines what options or selections are available, shortcut keys are limited, etc. No ability to import from Excel; minimal documentation on what operational streams of planning data might be available for performance measurement during the year (SKU? By Customer? By Pdt Group? By Region?).

What key advice would you give to other companies looking to introduce/use the product?

Support and consultant training is good but expensive. If you're ERP system has inflexible crap reporting, Phocas can provide a good solution.

How would you sum up your experience?

Seems to spend a lot of time trying to re-invent features already in Excel Graphing is weak and color selection non-existent (and not colorblind appropriate). Widgets are rudimentary and unable to draw information from multiple sources for analysis (inventory and sales). Basic performance of DB analytics is solid but user interfaces are far from intuitive.

Role

Head of business department

Number of employees

Less than 100

Industry

Retail

Source

Invited by the vendor, The Planning Survey 24, 04/2024

What do you like best?

Product is evolving and improving. Ability to interface with ERP and financial DBs. Support specialists are knowledgeable and enthusiastic.

What do you like least/what could be improved?

User interface is not intuitive to casual user. Tool tips, function hints, etc. are missing. For us, planning and forecasting are executive tasks, not a staffed department. Forecasting and planning elements are heavily dependent upon formats (i.e., financial layout) defined outside of forecasting component. Appears to be unable to import Excel or CSV data for planning data.

What key advice would you give to other companies looking to introduce/use the product?

–

How would you sum up your experience?

Because it is primarily an analytic tool that works well without ERP system, the forecasting feature is a useful addition. I would not position Phocas as a forecasting software.

Role

Head of business department

Number of employees

Less than 100

Industry

Retail

Source

Invited by the vendor, The Planning Survey 24, 04/2024

What do you like best?

Its versatility across multiple formats - i.e., sales BI, customers sales BI, finance module and forecasting and budgeting integration.

What do you like least/what could be improved?

It seems like the budgeting and forecasting module is still in the early stages of development despite being the most expensive subscription.

What key advice would you give to other companies looking to introduce/use the product?

Depending on the level of forecasting and complexity they are after, I may recommend a different tool. It is all dependent if they use the sales, ordering, consumer data BI tool because in conjunction with the finance tool is what makes the forecasting module suitable as it integrates very easily - even if building the forecasting / budget can be a bit cumbersome.

How would you sum up your experience?

Excellent BI and finance tool cannot wait to get the forecasting module up to the same level

Role

CEO

Number of employees

Less than 100

Industry

Horticulture

Source

Invited by the vendor, The Planning Survey 24, 04/2024

What do you like best?

Ease of drilling into the numbers and the way it the numbers flow from the P&L/Balance sheet right down to product/customer/supplier level.

What do you like least/what could be improved?

It would be good if there was better documentation within Phocas on how to use each area of the system.

What key advice would you give to other companies looking to introduce/use the product?

It is very powerful once you have it set up but there is a bit of work involved. To get the best out of the software you really need an internal IT person who can set up the reports and dashboards etc.

How would you sum up your experience?

Very good tool.

Role

CIO

Number of employees

Less than 100

Industry

Transportation and logistics

Source

Invited by the vendor, The Planning Survey 24, 04/2024

What do you like best?

Low barrier of entry for general users. Background setup for analytics is very user friendly and easy to build upon.

What do you like least/what could be improved?

Limited design options for graphs.

What key advice would you give to other companies looking to introduce/use the product?

Would recommend given the usability and team doing the implementation are very diligent in completing an integration.

How would you sum up your experience?

Good company, great product with exciting advances incoming with the implementation of AI.

Role

Head of business department

Number of employees

Less than 100

Industry

Retail

Source

Invited by the vendor, The Planning Survey 24, 04/2024

What do you like best?

Flexible and very good support team.

What do you like least/what could be improved?

Integration between analytics and budgeting and forecast models.

What key advice would you give to other companies looking to introduce/use the product?

Do it!

How would you sum up your experience?

Excellent and more user friendly than Power BI/Other BI products.

Role

Head of business department

Number of employees

Less than 100

Industry

Nonprofit Food Banking

Source

Invited by the vendor, The Planning Survey 24, 04/2024

What do you like best?

That everyone can prepare and see their budgets, and then their actuals are imported every night, so they always know where they are at within their budgets.

What do you like least/what could be improved?

Not much!

What key advice would you give to other companies looking to introduce/use the product?

Get the drivers setup during the overall setup. We went around our payroll driver because of the time it would take, now we're playing catchup this year trying to get it up and going. We still have great support, but having it done initially would have been ideal.

How would you sum up your experience?

I like Phocas and have recommended it to several other companies in my industry (Food Banking).

Role

Head of business department

Number of employees

Less than 100

Industry

Retail

Source

Invited by the vendor, The Planning Survey 24, 04/2024

What do you like best?

Ease of use.

What do you like least/what could be improved?

More flexibility around budgeting (or specific knowledge of doing so).

What key advice would you give to other companies looking to introduce/use the product?

Go for it.

How would you sum up your experience?

Love it. Sales, purchasing and financials used every day. Still learning Budgeting and Forecasting.

Role

Head of business department

Number of employees

100 - 2.500

Industry

Manufacturing

Source

Invited by the vendor, The Planning Survey 24, 04/2024

What do you like best?

Ease of use for all levels of users.

What do you like least/what could be improved?

Budgeting and forecasting needs some work to be able to display individual budgets.

What key advice would you give to other companies looking to introduce/use the product?

Do it.

How would you sum up your experience?

Great program that has saved us a lot of time and provided great analytical tools that would have taken us hours or even days to produce.

Role

Head of business department

Number of employees

100 - 2.500

Industry

Construction

Source

Invited by the vendor, The Planning Survey 24, 04/2024

What do you like best?

What do you like least/what could be improved?

Keep working on improving the ease of use of all the functions of the software.

What key advice would you give to other companies looking to introduce/use the product?

Invest the time in setting it up to maximize the ease of use. I.E favorite reports that provide simple clear information.

How would you sum up your experience?

A very good product that value adds to the overall business.

Role

Head of business department

Number of employees

100 - 2.500

Industry

Retail

Source

Invited by the vendor, The Planning Survey 24, 04/2024

What do you like best?

Flexibility and speed to get detailed forecasts.

What do you like least/what could be improved?

Can’t add in easily a new dimension you don’t have to see if it will work for budgeting. NI in the UK can.t be easily calculated through the payroll headcount function due to the levels and functions on that calc. We have a couple of companies, one database for sales and 2 for finance, currently looking at restructuring, hard to see budgets for different scenarios

What key advice would you give to other companies looking to introduce/use the product?

Embrace it and use it every day.

How would you sum up your experience?

Good evolving functionalities.

Role

CIO

Number of employees

100 - 2.500

Industry

Process industry

Source

Invited by the vendor, The Planning Survey 24, 04/2024

What do you like best?

Ease of use. Quick loading. Good UI.

What do you like least/what could be improved?

Data sync processes.

What key advice would you give to other companies looking to introduce/use the product?

Plan internally properly, before beginning an implementation.

How would you sum up your experience?

Overall, it is a great tool, at a very good price point. Effective for SME market.

Survey Information

Number of reviews for Phocas BI and financial planning platform

Reviewed versions

V23 29%, V24 71%

Peer groups in the survey

Midsize/Departmental Implementations, Products for Planning, Budgeting & Forecasting, Integrated Products for Planning and BI & Analytics

Interactive planning software comparison

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