Our primary use of Prophix is for budgeting and forecasting. We recently implemented account reconciliations. This has been very helpful since all account reconciliation backups are in one central location. It makes it much easier for the controller to review and approve reconciliations. We anticipate that our annual audit process will also be smoother and quicker.
Pros
Easy for end users to learn the system.
Easy to track workflows and who has or has not submitted information.
Easy to run reports.
Cons
The system can be slow.
Designing reports can be challenging.
More templates.
Likelihood to Recommend
If the budgeting is done with Excel spreadsheets, and your company is small to medium in size, Prophix is the system for you! Additionally, if your company is also doing monthly forecasting in Excel, Prophix will save you time and reduce errors. There are also many other worthwhile features, such as Account Reconciliation and consolidations.
VU
Verified User
Executive in Finance and Accounting (Market Research company, 201-500 employees)
Monthly comparative reporting specific to various stakeholders. Summarised reporting contains totaling accounts and KPIs with granular reporting down to individual GL level. Drill Across feature allows end users to reveal transactional details making up GL movements. Reporting scope for each user is subject to their security, typically based on cost centres. Budget is collected for the first year monthly with annual extrapolation to the subsequent year. Prophix workflow is used to manage budget collection and approval process with optional budget data snapshots in separate versions. The most recent forecast is used to seed budget data with adjustments such inflation applied to nominated accounts. Combination of approved budget and YTD actuals forms a basis for quarterly forecast. Collection and approval mechanism follows budget pattern. Subject to a substantial change in business operating environment, ad-hoc reforecasting is performed. Both forecast and budget benefits from several detailed models operating below GL line, such as personnel at employee or group of employees level, capex at an individual asset level and sales at customer level with a room for growth. Overall, Prophix system is flexible to account for specific needs and easy to maintain as the business environment evolves.
Pros
Reporting - single report that can be opened by multiple users, each will see only aspect specific to them based on their security access.
Budgeting - workflow driven budget data collection, visibility of its current status, ability to take action to ensure timely completion. Ability to snapshot budget data at a point in time. Ability to perform what-if scenarios.
Forecasting - as above with added benefit of either reusing budget level of grain or forecasting at high level.
Granular planning - ability to create unlimited number of subsidiary models to assist with the planning process. Non-financial data collected during budget/forecast process help with operation planning and variance analysis.
Cons
Performance - large models tend to underperform, particularly when leveraging heavy calculations. I believe this is addressed in the new Prophix version.
Structural changes require disruptive publish process. During publishing, various models are inaccessible. Whilst publish itself can be scheduled for after hours, structural change is not visible until published. Again, I believe this is addressed in the new Prophix version.
Support in local time zone - Prophix has local support in various time zones, but escalation can sometimes take a few days.
Likelihood to Recommend
Prophix is substantially out of the box product to be easy to use but flexible enough to allow for varied business modelling. No technical skills are required to deploy and maintain the solution. Owing to its out of the box nature, departing from Prophix sweet spot e.g. when leveraging transactional data, the solution is not as capable, however this is being addressed by the new Prophix release.
VU
Verified User
Consultant in Finance and Accounting (Information Technology & Services company, 11-50 employees)
We are a non-profit organization that uses Prophix for expense forecasting across multiple grants and contracts. We also track FTE projection for employees across projects and plan to begin expanding our use of revenue projections in the coming months.
Pros
Ad Hoc reporting allows the user to look at data in a variety of ways
Once the templates are set up correctly, there is little maintenance and a low chance of accidentally changing formulas
Processes are great for efficiently moving data
Cons
We have struggled with slow load times due to the complexity of our set up but are working with Prophix to resolve this.
We use Prophix to generate , Monthly performance & Variance analysis, with previous month , Budget and forecast both for the month and YTD position. We use Prophix as budgeting and forecasting tool. We use Prophix to prepare quarterly board pack for presentation in the board meeting. We use Prophix for analysis of regionwise performance. We use Prophix for group consolidation packs for consolidation of accounts at year end for closure of group accounts.
Pros
Monthly Performance reporting MTM & YTD
Group Consolidation
Revenue reconcilation
Board pack reporting
Cons
Uploading of financial information turnaround should be less than 1 hour
Cross check with Financial information to ensure zero error
Provision to input comments - actionable , for information
Provision to upload data thru excel templates
Likelihood to Recommend
I think Prophix is well suited for Monthly performance reporting both MTM & YTD, also to do variance analysis with budget & forecast. It helps Board pack for quarterly presentation to the Board, and also its a great support for group consolidation.
It helps us in forecasting & Budget , but I think it still needs improvement in template to support based on existing data, to make analysis and also to input notes which will help respective departments to give their input with comments.
We use Prophix for budgeting, forecasting, monthly reporting, people planning, cash flow planning. Prophix enables us to have a one stop solution for all things finance. It has allowed us to customize planning and reporting and is more efficient than prior products we have used.
Pros
flexible set up of cubes and personnel planning
friendly people and good customer service
solid performance and limited down time
Cons
Version control; there are issues using the same budget version in multiple years if adding detail (line item detail). What Prophix has explained as a benefit is a huge detriment for us and we've been working with them for 6 months on a fix and it's yet to get resolved
There are certain aspects that a messy; within our budgeting and forecasting detail, we have "unexplained balance" lines that show up that are distracting and add no value.
Lack of a centralized location for content outside of tool; for example, training, help, support, intranet, etc are all separate websites and not easy to get to. I'm not sure why all of this isn't linked to the same account and accessible through the tool. Why should we need separate passwords for everything Prophix?!
Likelihood to Recommend
Prophix is a flexible tool and the people are friendly. From the outset, I've felt that they genuinely have my interests in mind. I didn't feel rushed to make a decision, like some other vendors. However, the team is slow to respond/innovate on issues and I've wasted time in many areas. We have received bad advice on numerous occasions, leading us to rebuild certain components. For example, it was communicated to us we could budget in USD but that turned into a huge headache when we had to redo several thousand lines of budget into the correct local currency.
The product interfaces well with our ERP, however structure changes (new dept, office, etc) are not automated and require constant updates within Model Manager. This can be time consuming and create differences when actuals are pushed from the ERP if a change is not updated in Prophix.
Reporting is customizable and fairly easy to use.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Finance and Accounting (Legal Services company, 1001-5000 employees)
We use Prophix for budgeting/forecasting, personnel planning, and financial statements. We are able to pull data out of our data warehouse, have one source of the truth, and make better decisions based on this. The finance team is the main user of Prophix, but we are expanding its use for budgeting/forecasting. It solves the problem of disparate systems and allows for more efficient budgeting/forecasting, closing the books, and reporting.
Pros
Personnel planning allows you to plan employees and burden rates in a detailed way
Reporting--flexibility and customization of data within reports
Security and permissions for users is customizable to the department and account level
Budgeting/forecasting--taking this process out of Excel saves time and money
Cons
Investment in training during implementation
Improvements to the software have been focused on things we don't use
Likelihood to Recommend
Prophix provides a flexible alternative to standard reports available in our software. It allows us to create and customize modern financials with a limited amount of work. Prophix saves us time during the budgeting, close, and reporting processes.
The entire organization uses Prophix for budgeting, forecasting, financial reporting, and to provide non-Accounting employees financial insight. By adding Prophix, we have automated the annual budget process and removed issues around formula errors and multiple spreadsheets.
Pros
Automate the budget process by utilizing workflows.
Ability to drill down into the details of a line item on the financial statements.
Mitigates keying/formula errors in spreadsheets.
Cons
The tool is similar to Excel, however, it has some differences that take time to get used too.
Building the model usually takes consulting hours that are an additional cost.
Likelihood to Recommend
Prophix is great once you have the model built and want to run different scenarios. The tool can easily copy data, tweak a few inputs, and re-run in minutes. The better your company is setup for divvying out responsibilities by departments, the easier it will be to use the workflow functionality.
VU
Verified User
Supervisor in Finance and Accounting (Accounting company, 51-200 employees)
Only used by the Finance Department. Used to replace our old legacy FP&A tool that no longer has any vendor support in 2 major areas:
Adhoc Reporting
Budgeting
Pros
Ease of maintaining account dimensions in hierarchical relationships within the Data Cube AKA Model Manager without requiring too many technicalities IT department intervention.
Adhoc Analysis provides fast slicing and dicing of information in a Pivot table style Finance users are accustomed to.
The ability to reuse/modify existing data views to redeploy in new reports makes creating new reports easier.
Cons
Dashboarding features and aesthetic options are quite limited compared with PowerBI.
Template Studio (Report Designer) tries to mimic Excel look and feel but lacks many Excel shortcut keys and formatting options.
Report loading performance may deteriorate substantially when a report template is derived from multiple data views.
Likelihood to Recommend
They emphasize clients transitioning away from trying to manage too many spreadsheets. But from our experience in our budget implementation, we have budget information that must be referenced to offline spreadsheet sources which is not a feature currently supported by Prophix if the intention was to have users try to enter budget information using the cloud version.
They currently have a workaround for such clients for this particular scenario by introducing an Excel-Add on plug-in. What this does is it can import/export existing data views created from the cube onto a local spreadsheet. However, this feature only works for the data view, and not for Template Studio Reports, which is where the bulk of the Excel formatting/functionalities are required by users.
If clients are not fussy about the limited dashboard options and don't care too much about Excel functionalities when trying to replicate Excel-like reports within Prophix environment, then I would recommend it. Tries to replicate the look and feel of Excel but lacking.
VU
Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology (Information Technology & Services company, 501-1000 employees)
Prophix is used mainly in our finance department at this time. It's used for monthly financials, board reporting, budgeting, personnel tracking, etc. We are planning to purchase more licenses to roll out to our sales group in the next month. Prophix has helped our company become much more efficient and allowed us to have more consistency of reporting. Ad hoc reports that would have taken a couple hours to do now take five minutes!
Pros
Ad hoc reporting: This has made a significant difference in the turn around time of reporting.
Budgeting: We were able to cut out 2 1/2 months of our budget cycle because of all of the efficiencies we gained from Prophix.
Cons
I would like to see the ability to view reports similar to an Excel file. Within Prophix, you cannot view a report with different tabs; however, you can create a report binder that will take several different reports and combine them into one as an exported file.
Sometimes I have wanted to be able to link one report to another, and you cannot do that in Prophix.
Likelihood to Recommend
Prophix has been great for ad hoc reporting, monthly reporting, board reporting, budgeting, etc. I am still in the process of exploring all that Prophix can do, but over the last year that our company has used Prophix, I can't recommend it enough! We had requests for data that would take two days to pull together. With Prophix, it would take maybe five minutes to gather all the data. The ability to drill across and view transaction level detail when I'm reviewing the monthly statements has been invaluable. I would spend so much time going back and forth between different platforms to try to look something up, and it takes no time to view the drill across detail.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Finance and Accounting (Marketing & Advertising company, 201-500 employees)
We currently use Prophix for Budgeting, financial reporting and forecasting. We use the workflow manager to allow many users to input budget data, and at this time about 25 users have access.
Pros
Financial Reporting
Forecasting
Aggregating data in logical ways
Cons
I would have like to see Prophix take one budgeted item and follow it through all the way to the Finance Cube during implementation to verify all processes worked. Everything was discussed in a hypothetical scenario rather than actual
Faster CSP availability
It would be nice to be able to edit data views in templates
Likelihood to Recommend
Great financial reporting. I think after we get our feet under ourselves it will be a great time saver. We are currently in the process of reviewing our model set up and hope to continue making improvements.
VU
Verified User
Supervisor in Finance and Accounting (Architecture & Planning company, 1001-5000 employees)
