Unit4 is a global provider of cloud-based enterprise software for financials, HCM and FP&A. To strengthen its offerings for CPM and analytics, Unit4 acquired the German vendor Prevero in 2016. Prevero originally delivered CPM software to support planning, budgeting and forecasting, analytics and reporting processes and has now been fully integrated into Unit4’s ERP application ecosystem to provide its Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) solutions. While Unit4 FP&A historically attracted a strong customer base in the DACH and EMEA region, its appeal has subsequently broadened to mid-market and enterprise-level customers worldwide.
Unit4 FP&A solutions focus on people-centric industries, namely professional services, the public sector, not-for-profit organizations and higher education, but they also have a strong customer base in the utilities, manufacturing and retail industries. These sectors are supported with prebuilt business applications for financial planning, sales & operations planning, people planning & analytics, reporting & analytics, financial consolidation and IFRS 16. Unit4 FP&A solutions are available as standalone applications or integrated into its ERP suite. They deliver CPM technology with native integration to Unit4’s enterprise solutions.
Built on a highly flexible platform, Unit4 FP&A applications are adaptable to various CPM and analytics use cases. The solutions give business users the platform and tools they need to configure their planning, budgeting and forecasting, analytics, reporting and financial consolidation applications to meet individual requirements, without having to have a technical background. For data storage and navigation, Unit4 FP&A uses a ROLAP approach and offers typical OLAP navigation capabilities in its clients.
For planning, budgeting and forecasting, Unit4 FP&A provides comprehensive capabilities to support top-down, bottom-up and mixed planning processes. The product’s flexible development environment allows customers to address various planning topics on one common platform, with different aggregation levels (e.g., strategic as well as operational planning) for an integrated corporate planning approach (including financial planning). Planners can enter budget data in the FP&A Designer, HTML5 web client or Excel add-in.
In addition to planning, Unit4 FP&A also offers complementary analytics functionality. Reports are built in a tabular, Excel-like grid (‘worksheets’) in the FP&A Designer using tables and different chart types. Flexible options are available for formatting the tabular grid. Individual dashboards can be created in the web browser via drag & drop including existing worksheets and a wide variety of widgets (for visualization, analysis and input of data).
For financial consolidation purposes, Unit4 FP&A offers a prebuilt application that includes legal consolidation covering several consolidation standards as well as reporting capabilities and predefined disclosure statements.
User & Use Cases
59 percent of Unit4 FP&A users are planning users – significantly below the survey average of 69 percent – reflecting the fact that Unit4 FP&A is essentially an integrated CPM platform with planning as well as BI and analytics functionality. This is also born out in its typical use cases. Customers leverage Unit4 FP&A mainly for operational planning (80 percent) but also financial planning (76 percent). Here, planning takes place at different aggregation levels. Unit4 FP&A is used for budgeting (by 94 percent of customers), forecasting (73 percent) and strategic planning (50 percent). Besides planning, it is mainly used for standard/enterprise reporting (88 percent), ad hoc query (63 percent) and dashboards/BI applications (50 percent). Many respondents also plan to use it for dashboards/BI applications (43 percent) and group consolidation (26 percent) in the future.
Unit4 FP&A targets mid-sized and large companies across all industries. 78 percent of our sample of Unit4 FP&A customers come from mid-sized companies (100-2,500 employees) with a median of 100 users (including 60 using planning functionality), but the mean of 169 users (84 for planning) indicates there are also several larger implementations.
Current vs. planned use (planning use cases)
N=32
Current vs. planned use (besides planning)
N=32
Total number of users per company
N=32
Planning users per company
N=32
Percentage of employees using Unit4 FP&A
N=32
Planning users (as a percentage of all users)
N=32
Company size (number of employees)
N=32
Versions used
N=27
Summary of Unit4 FP&A highlights
With 17 leading positions across five different peer groups, Unit4 FP&A once again achieves a good set of results in this year’s Planning Survey. Convincing ratings in several important KPIs help to consolidate its position as a market-leading CPM platform that delivers considerable benefits to its customers. Companies can benefit from using Unit4 FP&A in terms of more precise/detailed planning, improved integration of planning with BI/analytics and increased transparency of planning. Overall, these benefits lead to a better quality of planning results for many customers. 72 percent of Unit4 FP&A users say they would “definitely” or “probably” recommend their planning product to other organizations – a good result and a solid indicator of customer satisfaction with the vendor and its product.
Flexibility – Leader
Peer group: Global Vendors
Implementer Support – Leader
Peer group: Financial Consolidation-Focused Products
Product Satisfaction – Leader
Peer group: Business Software Generalists
Reporting/Analysis – Leader
Peer group: Business Software Generalists
Self-Service – Leader
Peer group: Planning-Focused Products
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