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)8.080%
- 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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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 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.
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.
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
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.
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 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 30, 2017
SAP BPC - way to go
Across the whole organization. Addresses the problem of data integrity, too many manual data aggregation and cleansing processes and having all information in one source for financial planning and analysis. Employees were frustrated using Excel for a 70,000 employee company with $20B in revenues.
- Reporting
- Single source for data
- Financial modeling
- Internal system validations
- Dashboards
- Creation of some reports is complex although once done, very easy and user friendly
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.