Likelihood to Recommend Well suited: For use in multiple offices around the world. I was able to obtain financial reporting data from 5 foreign offices and then consolidate their data with 3 domestic USA offices to prepare a consolidated financial statement. Less Appropriate: Translating the financial value for consulting services could be a bit challenging because that required human interaction and judgement. It would have been great to be able to set up some software to be able to interpret this and let it run for all future project work revenue projection.
Read full review Wdesk is best suited for companies with demanding SEC filings and documents, with multiple revisions due to auditor/counsel review, and where financial reporting is extremely manual. Wdesk really helps take out the potential errors out of extremely manual processes, and helps automate regular financial reporting by allowing companies to link financial information and build customized flows of their information into financial statements and other documents (such as presentations or other internal reporting).
Read full review Pros This product handles budgeting by Employee and/or Position very well. It is highly flexible and allows Hyperion administrators the ability to develop a planning application that fits a variety of different business needs. It is great at calculating benefits using business rules to automate the population of these fringe costs in the overall budget planning process. This greatly reduces user error. It allows you to seed the operating budget based on changes to key drivers, such as percentage increases, flat dollar increases and more detailed changes using business rules. Allows visibility into the plans for each unit across the organization, rolled up into an overall budget for the campus. It handles the creation of budgets with multiple chartfield segments or dimensions, which most other budgeting systems cannot handle well. It can aggregate these very quickly. Teal Sexton Interim Director of Business Intelligence and Finance Systems
Read full review The biggest strength of the program for our team is that multiple users can work in the document at the same time. Multiple users can be in the program updating financial statements, footnotes, MD&A - all without stepping on each other's toes. Rolling forward the documents from one period to the next is pretty simple. Links to source documents are maintained and new ones can be added without much hassle. Edits and changes can be made right up until the last minute before filing. There is no waiting period or pencils-down period unless we enforce one ourselves - the Financial Reporting team is in control of the timing of our filings. Read full review Cons One pain point for us is the consolidation and translation process. Needing to translate the data over and over again is frustrating and there is no visibility into how many users are running a translation. If multiple users attempt to translate the same data set, say goodbye to your performance but you have no way of knowing! (Unless you want to pull up a task audit which is not a very realistic expectation). It has the been the quickest way for us to bring the system to it's knees. The consolidation process performs in direct correlation to the complexity of the calculation/consolidation rules. So, while the product is extremely flexible, you still have to be careful how you design your rules and calculations to make sure that you do it on the smallest subset of data as possible to avoid large processing times. This makes sense, but requires some significant expertise that most organizations do not have in-house. The Hyperion Financial Reporting product is ridiculously outdated and clunky to use. The interface for designing reports is not intuitive, and not easy to modify once a report is built. I think there must be a strategic decision to move away from it and go to something more like Oracle BI because I just can't understand why in the world they don't update the reporting product. It also requires a significant level of expertise to be able to use. Not a great solution at all if you want multiple end-users to create reports in something other than Excel. Nobody except the HFM admin (which I used to be) in our company even touches this module. Another pain point is the amount of IT support that is required to run this thing, and again, specialized knowledge of Hyperion products and how they work is required for IT to adequately support it. This goes for application servers and the Oracle database that the applications are running on. Read full review The automation could be better. A lot of mass updates are done manually. Sometimes the system has connection issues and certain functions are down. The customer service could be more proactive to provide regular training and sharing updates on the software. Customer service could be better to help process the mass updates in a timely fashion. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We're in the middle of the road because we are not sure that other products on the market fit the bill for what we need yet. Hyperion is expensive and burdensome from an administrator and maintenance standpoint, but it still seems to be the best solution for what we need. Show us an equally capable SaaS consolidation product and we'll talk again.
Read full review Usability Overall it's a good-to-go product because of its features. It's easy to set up, meets requirements, has quality support, etc. So far, it has been working quite well for me, and I wish to continue using it for as long as it meets my requirements.
Read full review Support Rating The premium support team provides much needed dedicated customer service which we are after for what we have paid for this service. We are satisfied with the service and support and do not have any instance where there was an issue that requires escalation to get the right support team. Though the incidence of major issues that requires the premium support are less, we prefer to keep this as a safety net.
Read full review Workiva's technical support is impeccable and undoubtedly one of the best. The times we needed them, they were super quick and willing to help. It works 24 hours a day, and there will always be someone to help with doubts or technical problems regarding the tool.
Read full review Alternatives Considered I use Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Mangement because the company I work at requires me to use it in the Financial Planning sector as most of their data is stored in it. I am open minded and ready to use other performance management tools created by Oracle if my work permits.
Ricky Bhatia Financial Planning Analyst- Student Assistant/ Consultant
Read full review We moved from a third party filer to doing it in house. Have seen demos of products like Active Disclosure, which has come a long way from the beta version I saw and but we are not too far gone with Wdesk for us to evaluate other products. When we first signed up with Webfilings, (former name of Workiva), there were no viable products in the market. I had seen an Oracle product and a beta version of Active Disclosure. It was not hard to see the ease and intuitive-screens, to guide one through the filing process. The excel-like spreadsheets were an added bonus.
Read full review Return on Investment Oracle Hyperion allows us to automate and consolidate financial data that used to be performed manually in spreadsheets. From that perspective the ROI is huge. Oracle Hyperion functionality is extensive and allows us to perform most functions for planning, consolidating and reporting on our financial data. One negative with Oracle Hyperion is that it is complicated to implement and maintain. It takes expertise at all levels (infrastructure and management) to realize the benefits from it. Read full review We spend less than we used to with a traditional printer. We have been able to do turn-on-a-dime equity offerings with last minute changes and still file on time. Inviting external legal into the platform has helped with communication but we actually suspect they spend MORE time (and billing) on our documents than they used to just simply because it's so easy to get at them anytime they want. Read full review ScreenShots