BPC review
We use BPC for reporting and forecasting in our company.
SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation)
Overview
What is SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation)?
The SAP BPC software is designed to help users plan and achieve a faster, more accurate close. The SAP BPC software aims to help users spend more time growing their business and less time closing books. The vendor’s value proposition…
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Popular Features
- Management Reporting (36)8.181%
- Forecasting (36)7.575%
- Excel-based Reporting (35)7.474%
- Management reporting (36)7.171%
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What is SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation)?
The SAP BPC software is designed to help users plan and achieve a faster, more accurate close. The SAP BPC software aims to help users spend more time growing their business and less time closing books. The vendor’s value proposition is that their software delivers planning, budgeting,…
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What is SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation)?
The SAP BPC software is designed to help users plan and achieve a faster, more accurate close. The SAP BPC software aims to help users spend more time growing their business and less time closing books. The vendor’s value proposition is that their software delivers planning, budgeting, forecasting, and financial consolidation capabilities in a single application. This, in turn, enables them to easily adjust plans and forecasts, speed up budget and closing cycles, and ensure compliance with financial reporting standards.
According to the vendor, with SAP BPC users can:
•Make better decisions based on what-if analyses and scenario planning
•Use collaboration tools to improve accountability and planning accuracy
•Shrink cycle times, close the books faster, and align their plans with strategic goals •Get real-time access to data in SAP S/4HANA Finance
•Run on their platform of choice – SAP BW/4HANA, SAP NetWeaver or on Microsoft
•Engage in further visualization and predictive analysis leveraging SAP Analytics Cloud in a seamless manner
SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation) Features
Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting Features
- Supported: Long-term financial planning
- Supported: Financial budgeting
- Supported: Forecasting
- Supported: Scenario modeling
- Supported: Management reporting
Consolidation and Close Features
- Supported: Financial data consolidation
- Supported: Journal entries and reports
- Supported: Multi-currency management
- Supported: Intercompany Eliminations
- Supported: Minority Ownership
- Supported: Local and consolidated reporting
- Supported: Detailed Audit Trails
Financial Reporting and Compliance Features
- Supported: Financial Statement Reporting
- Supported: Management Reporting
- Supported: Excel-based Reporting
- Supported: Automated board and financial reporting
Analytics and Reporting Features
- Supported: Personalized dashboards
- Supported: Color-coded scorecards
- Supported: KPIs
- Supported: Cost and profitability analysis
- Supported: Key Performance Indicator setting
- Supported: Benchmarking with external data
Integration Features
- Supported: Flat file integration
- Supported: Excel data integration
- Supported: Direct links to 3rd-party data sources
SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation) Screenshots
SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation) Integrations
SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation) Competitors
SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation) Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Mac |
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Oracle Hyperion (discontinued), Wolters Kluwer CCH® Tagetik, and Anaplan are common alternatives for SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation).
Reviewers rate Personalized dashboards highest, with a score of 8.7.
The most common users of SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation) are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Reviews and Ratings
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Reviews
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May 31, 2023
BPC review
We use BPC for reporting and forecasting in our company.
- Provides a very user friendly dashboard with information readily available
- Consolidates at a level appropriate to what is needed
- Issues reports that can be easily distributed to the company
- It could be a little easier to manipulate within the data
March 14, 2022
A financial reporting end-user perspective on SAP BPC.
We used SAP BPC for annual budgeting, quarterly forecasting, monthly Budvar analysis, and periodic external/internal reporting. We wanted to have an integrated suite of solutions that center around our ERP system, SAP. BPC was used globally throughout the organization.
- Integration with SAP actual results.
- Drilldown capabilities.
- Works well with Excel presentation.
- User interface not intuitive.
- Frequent system downtime/issues.
- No real-time update of entries.
March 10, 2022
Not so perfect but just does the job
mainly use for change control and change management in product life cycle management and reporting purpose.
- Detailed tracking at granular level
- access management
- traceability
- reporting
- user friendliness
- UI improvement
- Search capabilities
- Reporting
March 10, 2022
SAP BPC
The goal of utilizing SAP BPC (business planning and consolidation) is to be able to better plan and consolidate business.
- Business
- Planning
- Consolidation
- Corporate
- Forecasting
- Divesting
March 10, 2022
BPC made easy
- Forecasting
- Budgeting
- Consolidation
- Most of the utilities of BPC are very good for the netweaver version.
February 28, 2022
Easy Business Planner
SAP BPC was used in a previous company I was employed in to aid in the organization of business expenses. Also, it was used in order to compensate employees for personal expenses that were used during business hours, such as mileage related to business travel. It is easy to organize, process payments, and have an easy learning curve for all employees that required no external training.
- Expense organization.
- Payment processing.
- Ease of use for all users.
- No external training needed for employees to understand use of SAP BPC.
- Better implementation of mobile app.
- Improvement of UI look, minor gripe.
- Integrated chat support for quick answers to issues.
February 21, 2022
Collaborative Budget Planning tool for the organization
We use BPC for budget planning for the entire organization. It is extensively used by the finance and accounts team to manage the budgets and create workflows that can help complete this exercise in a collaborative manner. All senior leaders are given access to the system and they have to enter their budgets which undergo an approval process and final consolidation at the organization level. The use case is - The central team which manages BPC makes the template for budgets - both capex and overheads at the beginning of every year. Then, they extend the template to all senior leadership and the leadership accesses it via Excel plugin called Analysis for Office. Then the senior leaders input their nos and then submit it. Once submitted, the finance team is able to get the consolidated view of the planned budgets and then they approve or reject it. This also has a workflow where after every step, an approval is needed from the immediate manager.
- Budget Planning
- Workflow for approvals
- The tool can be used in a collaborative manner with different stakeholders
- Excellent integration with MS Excel
- The user interface is very bad
- The software plugin on excel is very slow and it often hangs the entire system
February 17, 2022
Excellent planning tool for Sales Planning in SAP data sources
Primarily used for Sales planning for the upcoming quarter. The data is then fed to SAP Analytics Cloud for further reporting. Have also used SAP BPC for Master Data Governance, budgeting and forecasting to some extent. During planning cycle, What- if scenarios are discussed and course corrections are made with ease.
- Data integration and connectivity
- Hybrid set-up with SAP Analytics Cloud
- Data Lifecycle Management
- Forecasting Capabilities
- Some kind of Top-down approach option for data entry would be appreciated
- Reporting performance can be improved
February 17, 2022
SAP BPC is great product for planning and consolidation with similar counterpart in cloud based offerings of SAP as SAC/Group Reporting
SAP BPC is a well integrated product in SAP portfolio, specially where SAP is the underlying core ERP. This is used for the planning and the consolidation purpose. Planning relates to financial planning elements, like short term working capital and long term liquidity etc. Consolidation is for group reporting purpose for combining financial information of various legal entities.
- Financial planning
- Talking with the underlying SAP ERP without duplicating data
- Group reporting capabilities
- For complex planning scenarios, where e.g. Anaplan has more intuitive features
- SAP BPC is more on-premise product and thus shift to cloud based offering of SAC and Group Reporting may be done for cloud first approach
September 02, 2021
Not your Grandmother's Spreadsheet
SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation) is being used as part of a larger project integrating several different databases. The end goal is to get the data from some proprietary systems into a format that will line up with SAP and allow timely forecasts and accurate reporting of past sales, billing, etc. It's a useful tool for this type of consolidation, especially when the end goal is SAP.
- Integrates with Excel.
- Has APIs that can connect to all different types of databases.
- Cube architecture allows for very big data
- The refresh time for our spreadsheets is maddeningly slow.
- It is not an intuitive product. I had to be taught how to unhide a tab in Excel because it doesn't let you unhide in the traditional way.
- It's very easy to wipe out mountains of data with a few keystrokes. There's no "undo" feature for this. I haven't done it, but others have. The data is backed up elsewhere, but you still have to reimport it and clean it up.
December 28, 2019
SAP BPC Review
BPC is used by our entire organization to do budgeting for the year. A BI team loads the data using custom SSIS components and a custom scripting language created by SAP. It addressed the problem of not being able to properly plan and consolidate financial information from disparate sources across the organization.
- The Finance team loves it.
- Custom reporting.
- Custom SSIS components.
- Custom scripting language.
November 19, 2019
SAP BPC, the SAP product made easy for financial users
Currently we use both functionalities of SAP BPC: Planning and Consolidation.
- Planning: With BPC we manage the financial budget across all the business units of the Company. We configured standard interfaces with the GL of our ERP (SAP R3) so we can easily measure the actuals vs. the annual plan. With the use of the EPM add-in for Excel, the financial users can create, consume and share reports.
- Consolidation: With the interfaces from the General Ledger to BPC it is easy to acquire information (balances) for reporting purposes. Also, we have configured business rules such as inter-company eliminations, adjustments or journals, so by executing a package from the EPM add in for Excel the consolidation team has been empowered and there is no IT involvement in the process.
- User friendly, with the use of the EPM add-in for Excel, business users can work in a familiar environment.
- SAP Analytics Cloud easy and native integration for dashboarding purposes.
- Can manage several business scenarios (versions): actuals, plan, forecast, etc.
- For Consolidation, there is a required dimension for auditing purposes (audit trail) so it is useful for internal and external audits.
- EPM add-in is only available for the Microsoft Windows Operating System.
- In order to open or refresh an inform, it is required to have the EPM add-in for MS Office already installed.
- Difficult to configure, ex. Script logic for ad-hoc adjustments.
April 11, 2019
Comprehensive Features
The user interface is similar. It uses MS Excel so it is very adaptable. Internal and external reporting has been made super easy.
- Very useful in analyzing the data. We are using it to compare historical performances month by month to current months.
- Great customer service.
- The program is very easy to learn due to its Excel UI.
- It brings several business units under one system and therefore data presented at the enterprise level is really solid.
- Well integrated with HANA.
- Implementation is very tricky. Make sure you know what you are looking for and what you will be using it for in the long run to be able to get best out of the software.
- EPM Limitations.
- Expensive for small and medium-sized companies.
January 17, 2019
An excellent system for planning budgets and goals
The use of BPCs within the organization of one of my clients has been fundamental to allowing highly skilled users in the area of business intelligence (professionals or very practical users in the BI sector) go into detail regarding well-defined processes of cost saving, reorganization of the company budget, and the restructuring and optimization of resources.
- Perfect integration with SAP
- The data, once made available and imported in the SAP environment, allows all users to use them immediately without having to implement any process of ETL or data manipulation
- Is optimized for SAP S/4HANA , so the finance department has a complete suite available to manage projects at best in a single software that speaks with the same business terms
- Working with extremely complex workbooks can have repercussions in terms of performance
- While certainly suitable for personnel already skilled in using and knowing the whole Sap environment, the documentation regarding the potentialities and above all the functionalities of the product could be slightly improved.
- Integration with SAP NetWeaver or Microsoft Excel requires good expertise for the implementation
September 26, 2018
SAP BPC
SAP BPC is used as Reporting tool of consolidation. It is used for monthly reporting (short Financial Statements) and quarterly reporting, including Intercompany reconciliation. We use also it to retrieve historical data based on different variants: i.e. IFRS/LOCAL GAAP/US GAAP, Local amount, Consolidated amount... etc.
- Legal consolidation
- Detailed reporting package
- Retrieval of historical data
- It's not user friendly
- Depending on how it is implemented it is not as flexible as it should be, in case of changes in consolidation rules
May 18, 2018
SAP BPC is Dying
SAP BPC is used to support financial consolidations by Accounting team and for budgeting & forecasting (Capex, Headcount, Opex, Integrated Financial Planning) by FP&A team. It is used across the whole organization.
- BPC NW version can use the functionalities of SAP BW for ETL and data warehousing.
- Complex business requirements and logic can be built using SAP ABAP.
- Can be scaled and support huge volume of data using SAP HANA capabilities.
- SAP should focus on delivering one single product for planning, consolidation and budgeting needs rather than providing a large list of options to choose from.
- The product is not very user-friendly compared to other cloud competitors. There is a heavy dependency on IT teams.
- SAP BPC should come up a pure cloud option.
April 10, 2018
SAP BPC Review
Our entire organization uses it for budgeting. Departments and offices enter annual expenses. Practice groups use it to track employees with annual billable hours and billable rates. Th finance and accounting department uses it for reporting as well as analyzing variances during the fiscal year. The system also is used for creating and updating revenue and expense forecasts during the year.
- Allows for tracking of actual vs budgeted expenses. Can have multiple budgets or forecasts for comparison.
- Can create reports that can be modified to show either department or office views of the data.
- Allows for budgeting of production hours, billed hours and collections by individual timekeeper.
- Data is not easily moved between modules. Several steps necessary to accomplish this.
- Users often overwrite data entered by others. Need better controls for this.
- Better reporting of changes between versions of a budget. In particular, the user who made the changes and what those changes were.
March 27, 2018
BPC MS general reveiw
We use BPC in our planning and forecasting for FP&A and consolidation for corporate reporting; as far as I know, we also use it for our international distribution.
- Running ad-hoc reports
- Researching on variance explanations
- Creating standardized reports across the team
- It'll be helpful to make the ID/description selection change a stand-alone button in the ribbon
- Add back the option to select and copy ID's from the dimension dropdown
March 23, 2018
Benefits of BPC
My company uses SAP BPC for forecasting and analysis and is now currently undergoing implementation for consolidation. It's currently used by finance departments, and once it's implemented for consolidation will be used by Corporate Reporting and Corporate Accounting. One of the benefits of SAP BPC is that two finance teams (Financial Planning & Analysis and Corporate Reporting and Corporate Accounting) will now be using the same tool for internal and external reporting. This will eliminate the need for reconciling systems, which is currently a manual and many times frustrating task. Like many other companies before SAP BPC, my company currently heavily utilizes Excel for consolidation, which has its flaws including not being able to have multiple users edit the workbook and slow performance. On the Financial Planning & Analysis side, SAP BPC has been instrumental in collaborative work between all business segments and Corporate. It has increased performance and allowed for faster quarter closes.
- SAP BPC is real time data. You can send information into the system and see it reflected in your reports immediately. Other systems may require a manual push into a reporting system.
- SAP BPC is a shared reporting tool, so multiple users can be working in a model/environment at the same time, real time. This is especially helpful if your workbooks incorporated multiple processes requiring multiple users to get into the same model.
- SAP BPC is a powerful tool designed to help all facets of the company, from cash flow to capital expenditures to headcount management to financial planning to consolidation.
- An easily accessible resource page for quick how-to's and tips, as well as things to avoid (maybe a YouTube page).
- In 10.1, one thing that was removed was the ability to go into the dimension and select multiple members/parents and copy-paste those into your workbook. Please bring this back.
- When I have a BPC workbook open and a non-BPC workbook open, it slows down performance because whenever I'm toggling between the two workbooks as it's constantly bringing in the EPM context pane into the non-BPC workbook. Is there any way to disable this easily?
We use it within our department of Financial Planning and Analysis only. It was initially used solely for its consolidation capabilities in order to better report and analyze data, both actuals and budget, with the budget being done in a separate application and loaded in. We have now implemented the planning cubes and use it to develop or annual budget and an annual reforecast with actuals still being loaded in at the end of each month.
- Allows for full integration of data to be analyzed in real time. Although we still load actuals on a delayed basis (2 business days after month end), when developing the budget, we not longer have to do a full loading process from a different application into BPC prior to being able to report and analyze the current budget status to prior budget versions or actuals.
- It is easy to learn basic report building. The hardest part is learning the available dimensions and the different possible combinations and their results, but that will also vary from company to company depending on the complexity of the industry.
- Being from a law firm, the system needed a lot of custom tailoring in order to fit our full needs (although many companies could say the same thing). Although the ability to highly customize the system to the company's needs is a positive, it frequently results in the system responding in unexplainable and unrepeatable ways which negatively impacts and slows the budget process. Because of the sporadic nature and variety of the issues, we are unable to repeat them on cue and therefore cannot nail down a solution.
March 21, 2018
SAP BPC, it’s OK
We primarily use BPC as the consolidation and external reporting software. We have a basic planning implementation to support reporting. Data entry is primarily integrated from ECC with some topside entries made by corporate at the business level. Plans are entered at a business level directly into BPC via forms or pulled in from ECC.
- Use of data sources allows easy identification of data origin. Ex: ECC, manual entry, management adjustment entry, ICC elimination, etc...
- Reporting is generally fast if best practices are used to avoid performance hits.
- There are a lot of BPC experts available to implement and provide training.
- BPC out of the box is a blank slate and requires system development to be implemented. Generally will need to hire consultants to build and train your organization.
- Many people are not familiar with multidimensional databases like BPC so there is a learning curve.
March 14, 2018
BPC Story - Baby Steps to Success
At the World Bank Group (WBG), SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) is used as a corporate performance management system to enable financial planning and management and to support the budget processes across IBRD, IFC, and MIGA.
- BPC acts as the single source for all budget, revenues, expenses, forecast plans and eliminates the need for budget monitoring staff to maintain their own spreadsheets and legacy systems.
- Results in substantial time and cost savings due to the reduction of manual errors and data redundancy, enhanced data quality, and data governance, and an expedited planning and monitoring cycle for unit level and corporate planners.
- EPM Menu can be simplified.
- Compatibility issues with MS Office 365 need to be resolved.
- Single sign on needs to be implemented.
March 13, 2018
BPC Planning & Consolidation based on MS Review
BPC is being used for consolidation purposes. It is being used by Finance Controllers. First all P&L trial balances from all sites are uploaded with a flat file coming from SAP at month-end. Then with input schedules the flows for B/S are being updated. The BPC team analyses if there are no significant variances or changes in mappings and then runs the consolidation process within BPC. A major issue with BPC is that there are still a lot of manual steps done by users and very little script logic is used in BPC to automate month-end process.
- The Excel EPM functions are really good
- BPF functionality with a step by step guidance is a plus
- Intercompany Eliminations within BPC engine is very straightforward and easy to setup
- When a change is needed in the EPM reports it is not very flexible and needs IT intervention
- Performance sometimes is an issue when consolidating more then 20 entities specially at quarter end
- Script logic complex to handle and always needs BPC consultant when changes are requiered even if minimal - has very high costs
March 09, 2018
Dynamic Tool - BPC
We use BPC for consolidations and eliminations for SEC filings as well for projections and forecasting. It allows for one source of the truth for month end reporting. Only accounting and finance employees have a BPC license. Financial statements and other reporting is pushed to our field users (GMs, VPs, etc).
- Accounting and finance users love this tool because reports are built using native Excel. If commands such as EPMCopyRange are utilized it can further the use of native Excel.
- Compared to BPC 7.5 our elimination and consolidation logic runs in a fraction of the time. Processes that would take multiple days can be accomplished within hours.
- Powerful and dynamic reports can be built to help business leaders make decisions and see trends.
- There is missing functionality on the ability to use the dynamic filter on apply a property when using the excluded members tab of the report editor. We are currently running SP30 BPC 10.1 and the ability existed in previous service packs. We now have to manually exclude some dimensions. We use member exclusions on our income statement tabs to help clean up the multiple total lines that appear when having two dimensions in the row running on member and descendants.
- In SP 30 and some of the later BPC 10.1 service packs, when a user searches for a dimension member, it displays the dimension member the number of times it shows up in another hierarchy. In previous service packs, when searching for a dimension, it would display the dimension member within the first hierarchy it appears in and then if the user clicked next, it would jump down to show the dimension member within the next hierarchy it is a part of.
- BPC is not able to handle to calculated member formulas in a report. For example, if a calculated profit center and a calculated datasource are used in a column of the report, BPC is not able to correctly compile and display the correct value for both calculated members.
March 06, 2018
SAP BPC answers the mail
SAP BPC is used by the finance function across the enterprise. It provides a planning solution for finance users for their revenue forecasts for the current year, next year, and five-year planning. BPC allows us to plan, consolidate and report our forecasts internally and externally.
- SAP BPC leverages Microsoft Excel well and provides an user interface that is easy to use for finance.
- SAP BPC integrates with our SAP R/3 to provide a holistic look at our project level data.
- SAP BPC provides flexibility that is needed in the A&D industry. We are able to customize functionalities for our business needs.
- I'd like to see BPC better handle large volumes of data. Our company plans at the contract level and often find ourselves struggling with data volume in terms of system performance.
- I'd like to see BPC have real-time data from our SAP R/3 system to facilitate a faster closing at month-end.