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…
A financial reporting end-user perspective on SAP BPC.
Not so perfect but just does the job
SAP BPC
Easy Business Planner
Collaborative Budget Planning tool for the organization
Excellent planning tool for Sales Planning in SAP data sources
SAP BPC is great product for planning and consolidation with similar counterpart in cloud based offerings of SAP as SAC/Group Reporting
Not your Grandmother's Spreadsheet
SAP BPC Review
SAP BPC, the SAP product made easy for financial users
- Planning: With BPC we manage the financial budget across all …
Comprehensive Features
An excellent system for planning budgets and goals
SAP BPC
Awards
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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%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Video Reviews
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Pricing
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,…
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting / Integration Services
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Features
Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting
These activities are designed to assist with both data-driven operational, short-term planning and strategic long term planning
- 8.2Long-term financial planning(32) Ratings
3-5 year financial plan with cashflow.
- 8.1Financial budgeting(33) Ratings
Annual budget for revenue and operating expenses, headcount/compensation, capital expenses, projects, etc.
- 7.5Forecasting(36) Ratings
Combining actuals and budgets, rolling forecasts, driver-based models.
- 6.2Scenario modeling(32) Ratings
Financial or operational modeling of alternate future states and planning for each.
- 7.1Management reporting(36) Ratings
Budget vs. actual or forecast, P&L’s, performance over time, between products etc.
Consolidation and Close
Consolidation of data from multiple entities with currency management, reporting and audit trails.
- 8.1Financial data consolidation(33) Ratings
Consolidating data from several entities into a single statement using US GAAP, IFRS or other standards.
- 7.8Journal entries and reports(28) Ratings
Ability to enter journal entry adjustments and produce reports showing all journal entries for a specific period.
- 8.3Multi-currency management(25) Ratings
Ability to handle foreign currency conversions during consolidation.
- 7.8Intercompany Eliminations(28) Ratings
Matching and elimination of intercompany revenue, expenses, and balance sheet accounts.
- 6.7Minority Ownership(20) Ratings
Consolidate financials full or partial ownership of subsidiaries, equity pick-up.
- 7.7Local and consolidated reporting(30) Ratings
Ability to report against individual business entities and the consolidated umbrella entity.
- 8.2Detailed Audit Trails(27) Ratings
Tracing changes to data and processes that were run.
Financial Reporting and Compliance
Financial statements and regulatory filings
- 8.3Financial Statement Reporting(32) Ratings
Creation and production of balance sheets, income statements, cash flows, other schedules
- 8.1Management Reporting(36) Ratings
Tools facilitating creation of internal ad hoc or standard reports.
- 7.4Excel-based Reporting(35) Ratings
Ad hoc or formatted reports using MS Excel.
- 8.1Automated board and financial reporting(27) Ratings
Tools to help automate creation of regulatory reports such as SEC filings and board books.
Analytics and Reporting
Dashboards and scorecards for KPI monitoring and benchmarking
- 8.7Personalized dashboards(21) Ratings
Create custom dashboards and reports without the help of IT or administrators.
- 8.6Color-coded scorecards(19) Ratings
Track and analyze performances with interactive, color-coded balanced scorecards.
- 7.9KPIs(30) Ratings
Select from a library of more than 6,000 key performance indicators, and incorporate KPIs into your planning process.
- 8.3Cost and profitability analysis(26) Ratings
Cost and profitability analysis provides data for business decision making.
- 8.3Key Performance Indicator setting(23) Ratings
Ability to set key performance indicators for measuring progress towards goals.
- 6.9Benchmarking with external data(18) Ratings
CPI, daily exchange rates, industry KPIs. with scheduled data refreshes.
Integration
Ability to integrate with external applications.
- 7.2Flat file integration(32) Ratings
Integration of flat files like text documents and comma separated files
- 7.7Excel data integration(34) Ratings
Ability to integrate directly with Excel data.
- 6.1Direct links to 3rd-party data sources(22) Ratings
Integration with external applications like ERP, CRM, HCM
Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation)?
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
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(267)Attribute Ratings
- 7Likelihood to Renew1 rating
- 9Availability2 ratings
- 7Performance2 ratings
- 9Usability2 ratings
- 7Support Rating2 ratings
- 9Online Training1 rating
- 9In-Person Training1 rating
- 8Implementation Rating2 ratings
- 8Configurability1 rating
- 9Product Scalability1 rating
- 7.6Ease of integration37 ratings
- 8Vendor pre-sale1 rating
- 8Vendor post-sale1 rating
Reviews
(1-25 of 37)BPC review
- 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
A financial reporting end-user perspective on SAP BPC.
- 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.
Not so perfect but just does the job
- Detailed tracking at granular level
- access management
- traceability
- reporting
- user friendliness
- UI improvement
- Search capabilities
- Reporting
SAP BPC
- Business
- Planning
- Consolidation
- Corporate
- Forecasting
- Divesting
BPC made easy
- Forecasting
- Budgeting
- Consolidation
- Most of the utilities of BPC are very good for the netweaver version.
Easy Business Planner
- 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.
Collaborative Budget Planning tool for the organization
- 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
Excellent planning tool for Sales Planning in SAP data sources
- 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
SAP BPC is great product for planning and consolidation with similar counterpart in cloud based offerings of SAP as SAC/Group Reporting
- 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
Not your Grandmother's Spreadsheet
- 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.
SAP BPC Review
- The Finance team loves it.
- Custom reporting.
- Custom SSIS components.
- Custom scripting language.
SAP BPC, the SAP product made easy for financial users
- 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.
Comprehensive Features
- 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.
An excellent system for planning budgets and goals
- 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
SAP BPC
- 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
SAP BPC is Dying
- 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.
SAP BPC is less appropriate for organizations using Agile methodology. It is not suitable for organizations in a hyper-growth cycle as the installation and implementation is time-consuming. It will not work for organizations where the planning and budgeting needs keep changing frequently. The UI of SAP BPC is not very intuitive and very difficult to set up a dynamic dashboard for senior executives and officials of CxO.
SAP BPC Review
- 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.
BPC MS general reveiw
- 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
Benefits of BPC
- 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?
- 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.
SAP BPC, it’s OK
- 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.
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.
At The World Bank Group, the implementation of BPC has enabled resource managers, budget planners, HR business partners, and activity planners across the institution to plan for budgets and expenses related to staffing/fixed costs, revenues and expenses across all sources of funds, work program allocations, capital investments, and project-based activity costing, etc.
The BPC system allows senior management to communicate budget ceilings and thresholds for top-down planning while automating real-time aggregation and consolidation of bottom-up plans for consumption by corporate budget units to perform variance analysis.
BPC Planning & Consolidation based on MS Review
- 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
Dynamic Tool - BPC
- 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.
SAP BPC answers the mail
- 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.
SAP BPC is well suited for companies with a large user base. Since BPC has a relatively familiar and easy user interface, it can be implemented across a large user group fairly quickly. The user interface is intuitive which facilitates an easier planning cycle.
Aerospace/Defense companies may need to customize SAP BPC to meet their business and customer needs. It would be ideal if SAP released a version of BPC specifically tailored towards the A&D industry.