Phocas Software Reviews

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.

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.

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.

The ease of use. As an admin of Phocas, it was very easy to get our staff onboarded and very comfortable with day to day usage. If the staff isn't going to use the tool, then it's worthless no matter how great the data is.

Phocas is great at listening to our issues and roll out timely updates to add new features or fix issues.

Deliver what was promised. Ease of implementation, Ease of training, Ease of Customer service.
Price point sealed the deal.

As we looked at several products we found that most of them had the same look and feel. Most wanted a high front end implementation cost along with a 2 year commitment. Phocas was willing to do a 'Install, try and buy' approach.... nothing to lose but some system admin time working with Phocas to setup the environment to prove it worked. So with that said ... our only 'con' comment is ... we wish we had implemented sooner.

I love the flexibility within Phocas and the ease with which you can customize reporting to fit so many different areas of business. I especially am thankful for the links that you can provide to non-users to share reporting outside of your company. Phocas makes my job so much easier and gives me the power to provide quick and useful reports.

Until I discovered the online videos and trainings, I was not able to use the software to the fullest! I highly recommend when the software is introduced to a new user, that they watch some of the 101 level trainings to learn all that can be done.

The ability to dive into category data, and split by customers, customers groups, date ranges, sales rep, is excellent.
Also the ability to present customers purchasing data to them via matrix reports and charts is very impressive.

Writing custom reports is a great feature but can be tricky if you don’t do it very often.

All information I need for sales, prospects easily available.
Updates every day

Nothing really. All works pretty easily for the info I need