Item: Excel4apps
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Used mainly by finance department but also by other analysts across the organization.
It is mainly used to retrieve financial data.

Pros and Cons

Retrieve data for financial reports (template or manual set report in excel)
To drill down into journal entries for detail analysis
To distinguish the input of different type of entries and by different users

It is possible but difficult to retrieve data or set criteria from different module into a single report or retrieve. If it is more user friendly instead of having to create a complex formula to retrieve the data, this function will be utilized more often.
It will be nice to have visual (graphs, etc.) report template available
It is helpful if we can retrieve data for a range of date, instead of just YTD, PTD etc. and multi-year data all at once for comparison too.

Return on Investment

It improved analysts' efficiency in data review
It helps in monthly reports (timely)
It improve the feasibility of some of the financial review.

Alternatives Considered

Qlik Sense, Yardi Voyager and TIBCO Jaspersoft

Excel4apps is more user friendly and can retrieve data much easier and in a nicer format than Jaspersoft.
Qlik Sense is useful and have more visual reporting and dashboard. However, it is usually used for higher level of analyses and review.
Yardi is used for specific purpose, which is different than Excel4apps. Excel4apps can pull all the financial data from Oracle, including billing and collections.

Key Insights

Do you think Excel4apps delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Excel4apps's feature set?

Yes

Did Excel4apps live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Excel4apps go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Excel4apps again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Qlik Sense, TIBCO Jaspersoft, Yardi Voyager

Usability

It is user friendly. It totally improve my efficiency and allow me to easily access some of the information which I have to spend hours to drilldown to in the past. It also allow me to enhance some of the reports and ways we prepare and calculate KPI.

Support Rating

I didn't really need much support as it is very user friendly. The initial implementation and training is useful enough for me to start exploring it myself. Some of the technical issues I experienced in the past are usually resolved in a timely manner and it didn't impact my work.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is wonderful for analysing since you can easily drill down to the level of detail you want for the data. It is also very helpful for monthly reporting with the preset report and you can create your own standardized report too. As long as you set up the data retrieve formula properly, you can retrieve different year, budget and forecast data from the system easily by changing a few criteria. It is more data driven so it is less appropriate for management who are looking for visual and summarized reports.

It is very useful especially for analyst

Overall Satisfaction with Excel4apps