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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 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
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.
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 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
BPC is being used as the system in which we develop our yearly budgets, collect quarterly forecast, and do an analysis of the spending and revenues throughout the organization. The FP&A organization is the heaviest user, with extensive reporting and analysis being done on a daily basis. Over 300 users across campus access it during budget season in order to enter their budgets and half that many enter it quarterly to update forecasts.
- Dimensional model allows for slicing and dicing of the data in a variety of ways
- This is a custom tool - it provides an environment but you define what the structures look like, which offers flexibility
- Updates are not backward compatible - on the server side they require complete reinstalls.
- While they suggest the tool is unlimited, in practice, there are substantial performance limitations on the Microsoft Platform if you let the cube get too large
- The Microsoft platform is legacy from the original tool (Outlooksoft) that SAP purchased. The result is that it gets the least effort in development
- If you aren't using SAP Business Warehouse, the load process is considerably more complex than it otherwise might be.
October 24, 2017
SAP Business Planning and Consolidation is worth every cent!
SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) is being used as both a planning and reporting system at our organization. It allows us to have control over the financials and allows for systematic driven results. Users like the flexibility of the tool and that it's built right into Microsoft Excel. It lowers the risk of reporting errors and increases the quality of our financials. We can work through many scenarios of [our] annual plan and/or monthly forecast to make sure we achieve the results we want in the business.
- Automation of financial processes using a systematic solution.
- User-friendly Excel Interface to allow for various reporting requirements.
- Data Integration with your current SAP ERP solution.
- The new 10.1 web interface is a little slow when trying to manage a lot of dimensions compared to previous 10.0 web interface.
- Training tutorials or application demos for various levels of user engagement.
- Business process flows are really nice to have to organize the flow of a process, but they are more of a maintenance than a help.
October 21, 2017
BPC worthy of consideration
We use BPC primarily for Planing and Consolidations/financial reporting. In support of Planning, we also have depreciation, resource assignment for projects and Head Count/Cost Center planning models. BPC enables us to group most planing activities within a logical progression. BPC enables us to have the planning detail and financial summary level in one place.
- Pushes data from one model to another. This is helpful to have detail in one model, and summary level in another model.
- Reporting flexibility using formatting, filtering and attributes is good. This offers flexible reporting and input templates by selectively choosing which data sets are relevant to the user.
- Scripting language isn't very robust...it is a proprietary language that isn't as capable as VBA or other languages. Sometime ABAP code is needed to supplement the business requirement.
- Web Templates don't have the same features as the Excel Ad-in. The use of filters and dimension over-rides don't exist.
October 20, 2017
Working with Business Planning and Consolidation
Business Planning and Consolidation is used as a primary tool for business Planning and Consolidation. It is used across the whole organization. Users are from all corners of the world. Specially Managers and Business Analysts.
Business Planning and Consolidation helps to plan / outlook across the organization and thus helps the corporate finance team to quickly get the planning number for analysis and any potential corrective action.
Business Planning and Consolidation helps to plan / outlook across the organization and thus helps the corporate finance team to quickly get the planning number for analysis and any potential corrective action.
- Easy to use for business users.
- Less need for involvement of IT
- Quickly setup master data and transaction data to simulate any ad-hoc scenario
- Single version of the truth enable fast, accurate management and statutory reporting.
- Web interface (reports and input forms) have limited functionality
- Difficult to maintain large dimensions
- For database reads or complex logic, script logic may not be best and need to do ABAP coding
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.