Modernized Budgeting, Planning, and Reporting
Updated April 23, 2024
Modernized Budgeting, Planning, and Reporting
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Prophix
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.
- Allocation of costs between departments and across divisions is made easy. Once the initial setup has been completed, the logic is applied across the company for budgeting and planning.
- Personnel planning is very straightforward and easy to maintain. All calculations are set up and applied as new personnel are added. It is easy to update rates, without having to update for each staff member individually.
- The system is very flexible for report creation. Basic parameters are required. Actual financial data is provided via a data view, rather than pulling data into the solution and storing it. This is great as it is not taking up additional storage for data that exists elsewhere.
- When clients are signed on and implementation begins, clients should be given access to Prophix Academy and told they should complete the pre-implementation training prior to starting implementation. This would provide the client with some basic structure of the system allowing them to ask educated questions throughout the implementation process.
- Given that we have only been using the system for approximately 7 months, I do not have any other suggestions for improvement at this time.
- Streamlined budgeting and planning
- Provided efficiencies, freeing up time to work on other initiatives
- Cloud platform eliminated the need to upgrade and purchase new hardware
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. The burden of maintenance has been transferred to the provider.
We were using True Sky prior to Prophix. Prophix is a lot more flexible and user friendly. It is difficult to compare the systems as Prophix is quite a bit more robust. Detailed planning manager in Prophix easily allows you to budget and forecast staffing costs right down to statutory deductions, benefits costs and allocations. Reporting is much easier to build and update in Prophix.
Do you think Prophix delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Prophix's feature set?
Yes
Did Prophix live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Prophix go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Prophix again?
Yes
Prophix Feature Ratings
Growing with Prophix
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.
Using Prophix
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.
20 - Contributors in the organization using Prophix represent Sales & Marketing, television Programming scheduling, television Content Production, Digital platform planning, Human Resources, Technology Services, Administration and Finance. Approvers are at the VP level and represent the same areas. Reviews in Finance are done at the analyst level and then approved at the director and VP level.
2 - People supporting Prophix should have a good understanding of Finance and accounting. They need to be able to understand where the numbers are coming from in order to be able to support the users of the system in their organization. They should also have experience in data literacy, application management, data reporting and visualization, problem-solving, financial modelling an process automation.
Using Prophix
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Convenient Familiar | Slow to learn Feel nervous using |
- reporting
- detailed planning
- security
- none