Unit4 gets 6 top ranks and 16 leading positions in 6 peer groups in BARC’s The Planning Survey

We’re thrilled to announce that Unit4 FP&A has been named a leader in 16 categories across its 6 different peer groups – and top-ranked in Flexibility in all of them – in BARC’s The Planning Survey 21.

BARC – one of Europe’s leading analyst firms – conducts The Planning Survey annually. It’s based on findings from the world’s largest and most comprehensive survey of planning software users. This year, a total of 1422 people responded – and 21 products (or product suites) were analysed in detail.

Because The Planning Survey examines user feedback on product selection across 29 different criteria (including Business Benefits, Project Success, Business Value, Recommendation, Customer Satisfaction, Experience, Functionality, and more), it provides one of the most comprehensive views of user satisfaction with planning tools available to buyers.

This year’s report takes a look at results based on responses from 31 of our customers, and shows that a fantastic 94% are satisfied with Unit4 FP&A. 94% also said they’d recommend us, and 90% said that our implementer support was either excellent or good. (The average is just 81%.)

We’re also rated very highly for our coverage – 68% said they chose Unit4 FP&A for its coverage of planning specific requirements (compared to 50% for the average tool) – and our flexibility. In fact, 89% of our customers bought our platform for its flexibility, nearly double that of the average.

Unit4 FP&A leads in flexibility for multiple groups

Our solution ranks at the head of the pack for Flexibility among all its peer groups – and is highlighted by BARC as the number one reason companies decide to buy from us. And this isn’t anything new – FP&A has been at the top of the table for Flexibility for several years.

BARC notes that our flexible but code-free development environment enables business users to address a variety of corporate and financial performance management topics – without need for special customizations. Our platform’s ability to create different applications for sub-budgets and planning strategies is supplemented by analytics functionality for reporting, dashboarding, analysis, and financial consolidation. Along with a variety of pre-built but easily adapted business solutions. Making it an especially powerful and flexible development environment for a variety of industries and line of business functions.

Leading positions in 16 categories

Unit4 FP&A has also taken 16 leading positions in its six peer groups. These include:

Business Benefits: Our leading position in two peer groups (maintaining our result from previous years) here demonstrates that many customers see a variety of benefits from using our product. These include reduced resource requirements, increased transparency, and improved integration of different sub-budgets. These all contribute to more precise planning and better quality results.

Project Success: According to our customers, projects with Unit4 FP&A tend to succeed – with levels of implementation satisfaction and the frequency of projects completed on time and on budget high.

Implementer Support: Customers confirm that the availability of skilled implementers for Unit4 FP&A are high – with 25% citing this as a reason for choosing the product. With Unit4 ERP’s global customer base, Unit4 FP&A implementation projects are now occurring worldwide – both through our own consulting teams and our newly enhanced partner network.

Product Satisfaction and Planning Functionality: The core of Unit4 FP&A is a comprehensive planning and forecasting engine suitable for a range of approaches – top-down, bottom-up, and combinations of both. Combined with a flexible development environment that allows our users to tackle a variety of topics on a single platform, this has led to a high level of satisfaction among our customers and made us a leader in the BI and Analytics Products peer group.

Ease of Use: A high proportion of our customers confirm that FP&A is easy to use both for planners and developers – and this was a major consideration in purchase for many of them. We’ve therefore been ranked a leader in this KPI for BI and Analytics Products.

Customer Experience: This is an aggregated KPI combining some of the KPIs mentioned above, along with a few others. Our strong results in multiple KPIs have earned us a place among the leaders in 2 peer groups for Customer Experience this year. Unit4 FP&A is flexible, considered easy to use by many customers – especially those in business departments in mid-sized and large companies, our main target group.

Unit4 FP&A vs Excel

One of the surprising (or not, if you’ve seen it for yourself) findings of The Planning Survey is that Excel is still one of the most commonly used products in planning and analytics. And this is in spite of widespread dissatisfaction with its features and limitations.

We’re very pleased to report that according to BARC, our customers have fewer complaints about Unit4 FP&A than Excel users have about Excel. Common issues like a lack of key product features, inflexibility, and an inability to handle large numbers of users or data volumes become a thing of the past for FP&A users.

We also beat Excel in terms of business benefits – FP&A reduces resource requirements for planning, increases transparency, and fully integrates budgets and plans from different parts of the organization.