How to choose the best FP&A reporting tool

How do you decide what financial planning and analysis (FP&A) software is best for your business? This question is daunting. And the decision is more so because the answer is high stakes and the solution requires time, people and money.

Like all new project initiatives, the internal decision makers responsible for your FP&A software selection will know the important characteristics your people need in the tool. Top of the list is likely to be compatibility with your ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system and the ability to handle data in real-time – so when reports are pulled, the results are accurate.

Depending on the current circumstances of your business – you might have recently bought another company, changed your CFO or keen to reduce manual processes in spreadsheets – an independent planning and budgeting team of experts like BARC is a useful resource in guiding your initial decision-making.

The Planning Survey 24 is the largest and most thorough fact-based analysis of the planning and budgeting software market currently available. Based on the real-world experiences of 1272 respondents, most of its value lies in the analysis of such a large and broad group of professionals globally. These business leaders use FP&A software regularly and share their experiences in the survey. We think the information available is powerful for your own software business decisions.

The survey reviews “a range of products and pricing from the large brands to the lesser-known companies that might not advertise as much but in many cases, offer great value to their customers” says BARC.

As finance teams need strong reporting capability embedded in their financial software, let us run you through how you might reference BARC to find a good match for a brief such as – What vendor has the best FP&A reporting?

Reporting and analysis is a top requirement when comparing budgeting, planning and forecasting tools

Firstly, reporting and analysis is a common request as standard reporting (73 per cent) and ad hoc query reporting (69 per cent) are the main requirements that business leaders look for in their budgeting, planning and forecasting software today, according to The Planning Survey. To examine correlations between what the most successful software providers do differently to the less successful ones, BARC classifies companies from leaders to laggards. Leaders comprise the top 10 percent based on their achievement of business benefits while the lowest 10 percent are the laggards.

“There are many reasons why FP&A professionals adopt planning, BI and analytics software and many ways these solutions are put to work,” reports BARC.

Various business benefit KPIs in the planning software are evaluated by the survey participants.  BARC then uses a scoring system to derive a composite weighted score for each business benefit, based on the level of benefits achieved by each software vendor.

In the Planning Survey 24, Phocas featured in three categories (or peer groups) where reporting and analysis was ranked. These categories are:

• Products for planning, budgeting and forecasting 
• Integrated products for planning BI and analytics 
• Mid-size implementations  

It's important to note the BARC survey reviews the combination of products that vendors offer in the planning category so in the Phocas example, the customers reviewed the Business Intelligence or Analytics product as well as Budgets and Forecasts and Financial Statements. Phocas describes the tools collectively as a Business Intelligence plus Financial Planning and Analysis (BI and FP&A) platform.

Phocas is thrilled that its customers working in FP&A teams and other leadership teams gave the reporting and analysis functionality such high scores – perfect 10/10 in these three categories.

BI + FP&A work together for improved budgeting and forecasting process

To help the reader grasp how the Phocas BI and FPA platform works it's beneficial for people to understand how the BI foundation, which does all the data consolidation, validation, and automation from your ERP and other business units' datasources provides all the reliable data for the Budgets and Forecasts and Financial Statements products. For example, if financial data changes in your ERP, then the Financial Statements you have set-up will also update automatically. If you want to do a deep dive into the profit margins of certain products or business performance of specific branches you will be able to access the structured data underpinning the Financial Statements.

Even though you will do most of the planning and collaboration in Phocas Budgets & Forecasts, the Financial Statements product plays a key role in reporting on your financial performance and financial health. In the Financial Statements software, you can customize financial reports such as Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow for each branch, create consolidated reports as well as automate any number of management reports. Then, you can visualize aspects of these reports in dashboards and investigate anomalies or metrics.

Best FP&A software for reporting and analysis

Let's compare the top six products in Reporting and Analysis for Planning Budgeting and Forecasting and hear from users of each product in BARC.

1) Phocas: 10/10 for reporting and analysis

"Low barrier of entry for general users. Background set-up for analytics is very user friendly and easy to build on. Great program that has saved us a lot of time and provided great analytical tools that would have taken us hours or even days to produce. "

2) Prophix: 9.8/10

"The structure is very complex. I takes a lot of training to understand how to set up the models just to get the base information structure in place. Building reports also requires training. It would save a lot of time if there were out-of-the-box reports the user could then modify for use. "

3) Board: 9.5/10

"Board is a flexible and comprehensive platform. Depending on the data complexity and volume, the product’s flexibility and rich functionality can lead to quite complex handling for inexperienced users when implementing and building intricate applications for customized solutions. "

4) Anaplan: 7.2/10

"Anaplan is a comprehensive planning, budgeting and forecasting platform rather than a BI and analytics tool. This has been confirmed by customer feedback. "

5) Jedox: 6.4/10  

"Jedox’s flexibility as a development environment and analytics can lead to complex handling when implementing or building intricate applications from scratch. "

6) Vena: 6.2/10

"Vena leverages Microsoft’s products to provide certain capabilities such as advanced dashboards and AI and machine learning support. Technical changes to the Microsoft technology stack could impair Vena’s function. "

Choosing the right FP&A reporting tool is important

When you start your software research try and pinpoint what is important to your people and your business and align on your ideal Financial Planning and Analytics tool. We often find finance leaders are looking for software to help them find and solve problems with a financial view or save time and customize reports. Phocas FP&A and BI does all of this and streamlines FP&A processes. The platform makes working with business partners on strategic planning much clearer as the software helps build a bridge between operational planning and financial planning.

Good luck with your search and FP&A software discovery. For access to the BARC Planning Survey click below.