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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)8.080%
- Forecasting (36)7.878%
- Excel-based Reporting (35)7.777%
- Management reporting (36)7.676%
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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, Wolters Kluwer CCH® Tagetik, and Anaplan are common alternatives for SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation).
Reviewers rate Personalized dashboards and Color-coded scorecards highest, with a score of 8.9.
The most common users of SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation) are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Reviews
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
March 05, 2018
Why BPC?
BPC Planning is used as a global financial planning and consolidation tool across all business units. It reduces the cycle time of rolling forecasts and brings accuracy and reliability to the forecast data. It eliminates manual work and the need to deal planning data in Excel. The workflow approval helps to improve the decision-making process.
- Real time consolidation
- One Source of truth for Plan and Actual
- Powerful Predictive Analytics capabilities
- Multiple Architecture Solutions available for BPC could end up with wrong selection of the tool that may not be appropriate for the organization
- Need to procure additional software to compliment BPC (SAP Analytics for Cloud), the cost associated with additional license requirements
- Maturity and stability of the latest version
November 21, 2017
SAP Business Planning and Consolidation
BPC is used by the whole organization. With this tool of SAP we were able to consolidate the balance sheet at the group level.
- Financial Reporting. Improved use of big data.
- Consolidation at legal point of view
- Data integrity and process optimization
- Tax reporting
- Path navigation
- Flexibility
October 20, 2017
BPC for Financial Forecasting and Consolidations
We use BPC for Consolidations and for the monthly financial forecast process. We also use BPC for the annual budgeting process. We plan at a resource and cost object level for expenses. For revenue and COGS, we multiply volumes by average prices or unit costs to calculate Gross Margin.
- BPC has an Excel front end, which makes it especially friendly for Finance teams who like to work primarily in spreadsheets.
- BPC reporting in Excel is easy to learn and it is fast to execute ad hoc reports that pull updated values directly from the database. With minimal training, users can learn how to create and maintain their own reports which can quickly match up and compare forecast and actual values.
- BPC allows you to use the same system for both actual consolidations and the financial forecast process. This enables users to quickly combine forecast and actual values timely. It is not necessary to wait for transfers of data to/from other systems to combine forecast and actual values in the same report.
- BPC should come standard with web functionality that enables the same functionality as the EPM formulas.
- BPC script logic should run faster for logic which has to reference member properties. When script logic has such programming, it often runs slow as it goes through the dimension information.
October 20, 2017
Kinross Advanced Reporting System (KARS) aka SAP-BPC
Used across the whole organization by approximately 150 users at corporate headquarters, mine sites and regional offices.
Used to consolidate actuals and budget for +/- 250 legal entities for quarterly external reporting and monthly internal management reporting.
Used to consolidate actuals and budget for +/- 250 legal entities for quarterly external reporting and monthly internal management reporting.
- Timeliness of close process i.e. ledgers are closed on work day 5 and consolidated financial statements are issued on work day 10 (non-quarter end months) and work day 15 (quarter end months).
- Consolidation completes in 12 minutes across 5 entity hierarchies.
- The Excel front-end report writer is very user friendly so users are able to create adhoc analysis reports quickly.
- From an administration point of view populating the 'Ownership' model is laborious across 5 Entity hierarchies and setting up data access profiles in Security is also tedious i.e. Security interface needs improvement.