Leave Excel behind, Prophix is the answer for Budgeting
November 17, 2015
Leave Excel behind, Prophix is the answer for Budgeting
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Performance Management
- Consolidations
- G/L Reporter
Overall Satisfaction with Prophix
We originally purchased Prophix to solve our consolidated budgeting spreadsheet mess. In addition to our consolidated budgeting we also use it now for detailed sales and material cost budgeting, and detailed sales and consolidated reporting. We have over 150 users spread over 6 locations in currently 3 countries. Nearly all of our users are in Sales & Marketing, while our operations managers receive reporting from Prophix. The biggest problem it solved is making our budget input all happen in a central place that eliminated issues of having the right version loaded or changing numbers in meetings and getting the updates re-distributed. We also use the product to give our sales team and managers on-demand daily sales reports that are broken down by both customer and product that can easily be used to find shortfalls by any/all of product line, customer, sales territory or market segment.
- One of the biggest issues we had with our excel budgets was formula's that linked multiple tabs and/or workbooks together either being wrong or getting written over. In Prohpix you write the formula once in the account structure and it cannot be broken by end users.
- Access rights are granted by users, so we are able to build one sales template for all of our reps to enter budgets and view reports, but they only are able to view the customers assigned to them. This makes updating easy as it all in once place.
- Prohpix connects direclty through SQL to our ERP data, and thus we are able to schedule automatic nightly imports of that days invoices. Every morning sales can access their updated results on-demand, or we can schedule Prophix to distribute it automatically to those who prefer that.
- Flexibility in data presentation. Ad-hoc reporting ability allows us to build a data view in Prophix in seconds during a meeting that would take an hour or more to generate all the different reports in our ERP and then consolidate them in excel and still not have the flexibility the cube structure offers.
- We operate in numerous currencies, Prophix has the ability to create multiple scenarios that we can use a different currency rate on each for our best case vs worst case currency rate analysis to be able to pick one for use on our budget.
- Licensing structure is prohibitive to a wider rollout of the product in our organization. Licenses are dedicated to specific users rather than concurrent # of users like our other software systems are. If they were concurrent, we would have all of our managers and supervisors in every department on it.
- The licensing structure dictates which users can access certain functionalities. The overall structure can only be edited by an administrator license, so there is no handing off of structure changes to others, it has to be an administrator.
- You can make custom listings of things like top 10 customers overall, or top 20 products in descending order, but it requires writing the formula in the account structure in MDX language, which as an Accountant, I don't have a clue about. If that could be simplified so i could do it myself, i would use those functions more.
- We expected to shorten our budget cycle and have lots of newfound freetime. That hasn't happened. If anything now, we spend more time on our budget cycle. Instead of it budget meetings essentially being spent looking at spreadsheets and trying to poke holes in them, our meetings are now more strategic sessions. We know the data is good, we know the version is right, we know the formula's work - so lets look at the data and make a plan with all of the decision makers in the same room.
- For our monthly sales reviews, i was able to create templates to pull all the data that managers were spending 6-8 hours a month compiling to now be able to pull from Prophix on 1 report and spend 3 minutes running and prining it essentially putting our best salespeople out on the road or phone 1 more day each month.
- With our currency scenario's we could see them impact one currency would have on us and we were able to hedge that currency to minimize its impact on our bottom line.
I don't remember the other 2 demo's we had 6 years ago, but we loved Prophix from the first demo. We could see that it looked enough like excel in the end user templates that everyone would be comfortable using it right away. At the same time for our upper management, the ad-hoc demonstration of slicing and dicing data was enough to see this wasn't just a pivot table and there was a great value in this product. The sales demo we had from Prophix involved sending them some sales and financial data ahead of time for them to build a small sample environment using our data and accounts. We could immediately see the value this would bring us and the potential of what we could do with it.