Modernized Budgeting, Planning, and Reporting

Prophix is being used across the organization for budgeting, planning, and reporting. It provides a single location to house all financial budgets and plans, as well as supporting information for those plans. It is also our company's financial reporting tool. It integrates well with our current ERP system, Great Plains. It is easy to maintain, not requiring support from our Technical Services department. Updating reporting monthly is done in a couple of steps and year end changeover takes less than an hour; the complexity of your reporting has little impact on this as reports can be created with 'named sets' for items like time and version only requiring you to update your current month and year when needed.

Rather than distributing templates to each person responsible for inputting budgets and forecasts, templates are built once in Prophix and then scheduled for each planning period. This has removed the burden of uploading data from the finance team. There is also an approval process within the system so the finance team expects that VP's have reviewed their respective plans once approvals have been submitted. Making adjustments to plans is much easier and so much more efficient. Once changes have been made, the impact is available to view immediately. The use of Prophix for planning has significantly reduce the time spent on data entry.

Importing data from systems that are not directly integrated is very easy. The user is able to select the data fields they wish to import and then align them to data fields in Prophix. We do this for payroll data as the cost for direct integration was too high. We have not integrated with any systems other than our ERP. Data is not imported from the ERP; it is only a viewpoint.

Our company was looking to move our ERP and Financial budgeting and reporting tools to a cloud environment. It was vey important that Prophix was available in a cloud environment. All maintenance is provided by Prophix, eliminating the need to rely on our Technical Support team. By having Prophix hosted in a cloud environment, the need to upgrade and replace hardware has also been eliminated. Security updates are provided in a much more timely manner. The burden of maintenance has been transferred to the provider.

We have successfully transitioned all of our financial reporting needs to Prophix. A lot of this was previously done in excel. The most important lessons we have learned along the way is not to try and do everything by ourselves. The customer success team is very helpful and great for brain storming with. Things we thought might be too complicated, actually were not.

At this time we only use Prophix for financial reporting, although we were successful in setting up a forecasting model for number of subscribers. We are also able to track FTE's more efficiently through reporting. We are in the process of building dashboards to highlight various non-financial items to managers that would otherwise be distributed by multiple department groups.

Prophix has been excellent to partner with right from the start. The sales team is very knowledgeable and was able to present a customized demo for our team. Implementation was straight-forward and hands-on. A great way to learn how the system works! They have an excellent training platform online where you can learn at your own pace and refer back any time you need a refresher. The customer service team is very knowledgeable about the system and if the person you are working with is not sure about something, they will bring in another consultant to help out. We just experienced Prophix's annual conference, and although it was virtual this year, we were very impressed with how well it was organized and how much they communicate in regards to innovation. We are continuing to build upon the foundation we have built in the system. The learning curve was a lot smaller than other systems that I have been exposed to.

We are using line item details when preparing budgets and forecasts. This saves time for users as they do not need to track details pertaining to an account in an external worksheet. It is also more efficient for the Finance team, as the details are available when needed and we are not waiting for a response from the person who entered the information.

We use workflow to manage our budget and forecast data input timelines. Department managers receive notification when templates are ready for data entry and a link to their specific template. Once they submit their information, the person assigned to review and approve their planning receives a notification and link to the work needing approval. Once it has been approved, finance receives a notification that the information is ready for review. There is no need to email multiple templates to multiple users. Timelines are set at the beginning of the planning cycle and notifications automatically sent as deadlines approach. This feature is a true time saver for the Finance team and for the individual contributor.

I don't believe there is a premium support package available to purchase. We always purchase a customer success package which includes as much support as one needs. Prophix also has a training Academy available online; it provides an additional level of support. Processes are well documented in that area. User forum provides another area for support or tossing around an idea. Users are a great resource when you are creating new models. You will find at least one company that has tried, or is doing, what you are exploring.

Our ERP is host in a private cloud. It is not a cloud-based product. Prophix has been exceptional in their support when we are required to update databases and lose connection to reporting. It is always something simple, but has a big impact on our end users. They are always willing to attend support meetings with our third party cloud service to help make any required updates.