Kepion, great for MS based Planning & Budgeting
March 23, 2018

Kepion, great for MS based Planning & Budgeting

Sindri Sigurjonsson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review

Overall Satisfaction with Kepion Planning

Our company is a partner/reseller for Kepion. We help our customers to solve our budgeting, planning & forecasting process.

Pros

  • Customizable platform: Enables its users to handle just about any kind of budgeting scenarios tailored to each customer needs, whether based on drivers, allocations integrations with other systems (such as S&OP processes).
  • Easy integration with other systems: As data is stored within an MS SQL database it is very easy to integrate other applications with it for reporting, such as Tableau or PowerBI or from other downline systems such as S&OP.
  • Real-time: Enables the possibility to calculate bottom line results for all applications immediately allowing the possibility to calculate easily what-if scenarios.
  • Not stuck: within a single way of budgeting. as part of the beyond budgeting movement, companies have been creating a more driver-based high-level forecasting which is often a problem with specific budgeting systems that are locked within the P&L statement. Here you can make it as simple or as complicated as needed.

Cons

  • Silverlight functionality is outdated which makes the front end solution a little bit old compared to latest UI. They will be tackling it in Q2 2018, but it leaves users wanting for more.
  • Reporting functionalities: Are not state of the art, we recommend users creating official reports within Kepion, but focusing on Tableau or PowerBI for reporting purposes as this is not and will never be Kepion strengths compared to the likes of Tableau.
  • Being customizable is great, however, the solution is not an out-of-the-box solution and does require a little integration to work. For smaller companies (under 5M USD) I would still recommend Excel.
We are a Microsoft gold analytics partner. As such, we were looking for a Microsoft friendly solution which would fit into our analytics stack with Tableau on top. Kepion is a lightweight easy to use solution which integrates perfectly with the Microsoft framework. It is much easier to use and intuitive than the heavy Cognos and SAP/BO systems. However, if my existing infrastructure is Cognos, SAP or Oracle I would consider using that technology. For Microsoft SQL companies this is a great choice.
The solution works extremely well for companies in complicated operations or with the ambition to forecast their operations on a driver based way or wanting to have the ability to create different scenarios based on external or internal drivers. It is a perfect piece of an existing analytical infrastructure (DWH/BI) lacking a planning solution on top.

Kepion Planning Feature Ratings

Long-term financial planning
10
Financial budgeting
9
Forecasting
9
Scenario modeling
9
Management reporting
7
Financial data consolidation
7
Journal entries and reports
7
Multi-currency management
10
Intercompany Eliminations
8
Minority Ownership
8
Local and consolidated reporting
9
Detailed Audit Trails
9
Financial Statement Reporting
7
Management Reporting
7
Excel-based Reporting
10
Automated board and financial reporting
8
XBRL support for regulatory filing
7
Personalized dashboards
7
Color-coded scorecards
7
KPIs
7
Cost and profitability analysis
9
Key Performance Indicator setting
7
Benchmarking with external data
7
Flat file integration
10
Excel data integration
10
Direct links to 3rd-party data sources
10

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