Phocas Software

The ease of use of Phocas is what puts it at the top of our list for BI software. The set up of the data was quick and easy (with great support from the Phocas guys) and ability to drill down from top line data right into the detail of a transaction is what makes Phocas a great tool for us. Phocas is widely used across our business to track and analyse sales data, finance data and purchasing data with future plans to add more modules. The PUG Forum is also a good feature for me, if there is something that you don't know how to do then you'll find the info there or someone can point you in the right direction. It's also a great place to suggest the feature that you'd like to see and Phocas review and add on to their product road map, so you know they are listening to your ideas.

I'd say the visualizations and widgets on the dashboards could do with abit of updating. The charts aren't always a flexible as you'd like with axes labels and adjusting the axes to suit the chart, plus you have to be quite specific with the data in the first place to get the chart you want.

It is very easy to use! I can show someone the basics in 5 to 10 minutes and they are off and running creating favorites and dashboards. The software is updated every month and their support and documentation is outstanding.
The product gives us the information we need faster than doing it in our ERP system. With a couple of clicks you can analyze you sales data and then quickly change views to look at the data in a completely different way. It very robust in all the options you have.
The company is developing based on their customer needs, you can tell that they all want to help us achieve success with this product.

This is hard to say because their are few cons. We have requested enhancements and we have some support issues that are submitted. But we have no visibility , (web portal), to review what we already submitted. It would be nice to have a support portal to check open cases and enhancements we have submitted.

Ease of use. Within seconds I can find the exact data I am looking for. It requires very little technical knowledge, however, I have set up many advanced sales--and even financial--reports using Custom Mode. The software loads quickly, and I have rarely encountered a bug. On the few occasions where I have emailed the support desk they ALWAYS respond quickly and have a solution implemented right away. This is definitely not the case with many other software companies that I deal with. I love Phocas.

This is very minor, but exporting reports could use some touch ups. Exporting to Excel comes with conditional formatting. Some users may like it, however I almost always remove the conditional formats because it dramatically slows down other functions I may perform with the data in Excel. Again, this is very minor as I understand the usefulness to some users of having the conditional formats already set up. I also occasionally print a report that displays in a weird format with regards to column headings and column widths.

I have been exposed to 10 or more different operating systems over the course of my 26 year business career. NONE of them have provided adequate business intelligence tools. Phocas is highly intuitive and thorough which saves me hours per week of spreadsheet work. I cannot offer a better compliment than it being an amazing time management tool.

There are a few issues I have with loading budgets and working through Administrative User rights but that is an infrequent issue. I would like to have a few additional graphical options for data visualization but it works just fine as it is. What I like the absolute least is that we didn't add additional modules...accounting, pricing tools... and have no plans to do so in the near future due to budgetary contraints.