Unit4 is a global provider of cloud-based enterprise software for ERP, HCM, financial management and FP&A with a focus on midsize, people-centric organizations. The company is headquartered in Utrecht, the Netherlands, with additional offices in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. Unit4 currently has more than 2,500 employees worldwide and serves over 5,000 customers.
Unit4 FP&A, the vendor’s core offering for CPM and analytics, was an acquisition in 2016. The product is fully integrated into Unit4’s ERP application ecosystem to provide solutions for planning, budgeting and forecasting, analytics, reporting and financial consolidation. It can be used together with the Unit4 ERP suite or standalone with non-Unit4 applications. Unit4 FP&A solutions focus on people-centric industries, namely professional services, the public sector, not-for-profit organizations and higher education, but they also have a strong customer base in the utilities, manufacturing and retail industries. These sectors are supported with prebuilt business applications for financial planning, sales and operations planning, people planning and analytics, reporting and analytics, financial consolidation and IFRS 16. Unit4 FP&A solutions are available as standalone applications or integrated into the Unit4 ERP suite. They provide CPM technology with native integration to Unit4’s enterprise solutions. Unit4 FP&A is available for deployment in the Microsoft Azure cloud.
Unit4 FP&A is a highly flexible platform focused on power users in business departments who create individual applications. Based on the product’s flexible capabilities, a wide range of comprehensive prebuilt models for various CPM and analytics use cases are available to enhance the platform and accelerate project implementation. These topical and industry solutions can be flexibly configured to meet individual planning, budgeting and forecasting, analytics, reporting and financial consolidation requirements. For data storage and navigation, Unit4 FP&A uses a ROLAP approach and offers typical OLAP navigation capabilities in its clients.
For planning, budgeting and forecasting, Unit4 FP&A provides comprehensive capabilities to support top-down, bottom-up and mixed planning processes. The product’s flexible development environment allows customers to address various planning topics on one common platform, with different aggregation levels (e.g., strategic as well as operational planning) for an integrated business planning approach (including financial planning). Planners can enter budget data using the web client, the FP&A Designer (rich client) or an Excel add-in. For forecasting, Unit4 FP&A provides a wizard that generates forecast values based on historical data. Predefined forecasting options include linear trend, moving averages, exponential smoothing, interpolation and more. AI-based forecasts can be generated with external AI services (e.g., Azure Machine Learning, Amazon AI Services, Google AI) that exchange data with Unit4 FP&A via APIs.
In addition to its planning capabilities, Unit4 FP&A also offers complementary reporting and analytics functionality. Report creation is done in a tabular, Excel-like grid (‘worksheets’) in the FP&A Designer using tables and different chart types. Flexible options are available for formatting the tabular grid. Moreover, individual dashboards can be created in the web browser via drag-and-drop including existing worksheets and a wide variety of widgets (for visualization, analysis and input of data).
For financial consolidation purposes, Unit4 FP&A offers a prebuilt application that includes legal consolidation covering several consolidation standards as well as reporting capabilities and predefined disclosure statements.
