Collaborative Budget Planning tool for the organization
February 21, 2022

Collaborative Budget Planning tool for the organization

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

SAP NetWeaver Edition

Overall Satisfaction with SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation)

We use BPC for budget planning for the entire organization. It is extensively used by the finance and accounts team to manage the budgets and create workflows that can help complete this exercise in a collaborative manner. All senior leaders are given access to the system and they have to enter their budgets which undergo an approval process and final consolidation at the organization level. The use case is - The central team which manages BPC makes the template for budgets - both capex and overheads at the beginning of every year. Then, they extend the template to all senior leadership and the leadership accesses it via Excel plugin called Analysis for Office. Then the senior leaders input their nos and then submit it. Once submitted, the finance team is able to get the consolidated view of the planned budgets and then they approve or reject it. This also has a workflow where after every step, an approval is needed from the immediate manager.
  • Budget Planning
  • Workflow for approvals
  • The tool can be used in a collaborative manner with different stakeholders
  • Excellent integration with MS Excel
  • The user interface is very bad
  • The software plugin on excel is very slow and it often hangs the entire system
  • Reduced time for completion of Annual budgeting exercise for the organization
  • Reduced cost in terms of not having need of multiple applications for the same purpose
It has good integration with Excel using dedicated plugin. The plugin - Analysis for Office works well... however the only downside is that it makes the system and Excel very slow.
It is well suited for doing a consolidated budget planning exercise across multiple functions and stakeholders. Our use case is - a template is created by finance team which is then extended to all stakeholders ( senior leadership that are responsible for budgeting). They then access it via plugin - Analysis for Office and then submit the budget nos. The software then consolidates it across functions and groups and then finance can review and approve it. The whole exercise is ale to get completed within a week due to the features of the software.

SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation) Feature Ratings

Long-term financial planning
10
Financial budgeting
10
Forecasting
10
Scenario modeling
7
Management reporting
7
Financial data consolidation
10
Journal entries and reports
10
Intercompany Eliminations
8
Detailed Audit Trails
10
Financial Statement Reporting
10
Management Reporting
10
Excel-based Reporting
10
Automated board and financial reporting
10
Personalized dashboards
10
KPIs
10
Cost and profitability analysis
10
Key Performance Indicator setting
10
Benchmarking with external data
10
Flat file integration
10
Excel data integration
10
Direct links to 3rd-party data sources
7