Cube vs. Kepion Planning

1) The budget process. In QBO the budgeting capability is non-existant, unless you like manually typing in every scenario and not being able to budget by class. Cube houses my budget/forecast scenarios & lets me view and analyze by my company's preferred data points; department, GL account, vendor, & sales campaign. I'm able to run monthly budget variance reports and plan for the future with ease. 2) We've begun using Cube to help analyze profitablity by sales job. We've never had such easy access to this type of info in the past, so this is a benefit I can directly attribute to Cube. 3) We're beginning now to use an integration with our payroll software to work on headcount planning and payroll analysis.

Well-suited: Migrating from planning in Excel, scenarios when multiple users are involved in the planning process, scenarios where there is a commitment to improve the planning process and accuracy.

Less appropriate: Where users are looking for a lower-overhead, more visual, less-connected solution.

• Push/pull information across any Google Sheet or Excel workbook.
• Budget at a much more granular level (by month by account by the department by vendor).
• Custom mapping to allow for multiple cuts of the same data.
• Bulk range selection within a workbook.

• Customizable platform: Enables its users to handle just about any kind of budgeting scenarios tailored to each customer needs, whether based on drivers, allocations integrations with other systems (such as S&OP processes).
• Easy integration with other systems: As data is stored within an MS SQL database it is very easy to integrate other applications with it for reporting, such as Tableau or PowerBI or from other downline systems such as S&OP.
• Real-time: Enables the possibility to calculate bottom line results for all applications immediately allowing the possibility to calculate easily what-if scenarios.
• Not stuck: within a single way of budgeting. as part of the beyond budgeting movement, companies have been creating a more driver-based high-level forecasting which is often a problem with specific budgeting systems that are locked within the P&L statement. Here you can make it as simple or as complicated as needed.

• Limited to 8 top line dimensions. Although you can bring in as many attributes of data as you want, but I would really like Cube to increase top line dimensions to 10.
• The ability for cross level interaction within multiples cube would be a major plus once implemented.

• Interface: The interface is built in Silverlight, so is a little clunky and inflexible. Kepion are, however, planning to launch a HTML5 version in March 2018, which will greatly enhance the product.
• Visualisation: We usually use Kepion for data entry and deep analysis, and then leverage tools like Power BI or Tableau to visualise data or create aggregated management reports.

Cube was just a lot easier to use than Vena. We took some time to look at Vena as well and while their product was impressive, our organization was not yet there. We needed something we could implement quickly, and in today's day and age I think that is a very important quality to have. Start up and early stage companies do not have the luxury of implementation teams and massive IT resources so Cube was a huge help.

Incentivized

We are a Microsoft gold analytics partner. As such, we were looking for a Microsoft friendly solution which would fit into our analytics stack with Tableau on top. Kepion is a lightweight easy to use solution which integrates perfectly with the Microsoft framework. It is much easier to use and intuitive than the heavy Cognos and SAP/BO systems. However, if my existing infrastructure is Cognos, SAP or Oracle I would consider using that technology. For Microsoft SQL companies this is a great choice.

• It has decreased the amount of time it takes to build reports by days
• I can rest easy knowing the knowledge is accurate and there is no human error
• I have been able to create more reports than I ever dreamed of with the new time and ease of use

Incentivized