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.

Easy to pull in our ERP data. Good to summarize trends and KPI metrics. Matrix feature is great to find correlated products "like" customers aren't buying. Ability to filter (called "Focus") on a dimension and all of the widgets within the dashboards will update to just show the info relative to that filter. Ability to quickly change dimensions and measures to show information in different ways. The customer service department is awesome - will help whenever and however they can.

Custom calculations are hard to use. Graphing tools are not robust (i.e. no data labels, data tables, combo charts are limited, etc.) Needs an additional user license that fits in between the Viewer and Full Licenses to give additional user features like exporting, but not the ability to design dashboards. Formatting and sorting the data is below average. The back-end Designer tool takes awhile to master. Wish there was a handbook or instructions on how to use the different features of the software.

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.

Ease of use, speed of reporting and level of detail available that can be accessed. Automated reporting saves a lot of time. Support from the account managers when required is excellent.

Sometimes some of the functionality could be improved further to allow more flexibility. An example here would be multiple options for subscriptions i.e. a weekly report that you could also set to receive at monthend without the need to create a new favourite. Nest function is a fantastic addition to the functionality but due to the way Phocas works you have to start at the bottom layer of data then build layers above.

The Product is easy to use, clear and concise with a good simple view of the data.

Maybe some more different style's of graphs would be good.

Hi Peter, thanks for taking the time to leave us a review, we love that you're able to quickly get to actionable data with Phocas. If you have any graphs or gauges that you are really missing from your dashboards we would like to know more - you can always email us at hello@phocassoftware.com Warm regards, Mike Hills Global Head of Customer

Offers easy deployment and maintenance. Database builds are a snap while offering dynamic reporting, dashboards and alerts.

More access to backend functionality would be helpful.

The ease of use is great, and has brought so much benefit to our company. We are able to customize reports and dashboards to our needs as a company, which is a huge deal. Getting reports out to our field is easy and painless. We use subscriptions constantly, and that has made many employee's lives easier.

I wish, still there was more ability to customize the report layouts. There are a lot of times when I have to create the report in Phocas, export it, and then do additional formatting in Excel. Also, the ability to download an entire dashboard would be amazing! It would make it so much easier than exporting each part individually.

Ease of use. Depth of its capabilities. Intuitive - Minimal Training needed for general user.

I wish I had more time to learn the product backend features.

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.

We have been a user of Phocas since 2003 and it has proved to be the single most useful piece of software we have ever used. We have our staff, customers and suppliers accessing the system, it is that good. Our suppliers prefer to use Phocas to their own in house systems and our customers say they have never seen anything as good. Without Phocas we would seriously struggle to know what is going on in our business.

There is nothing we don't really like...

I love the ability to customize your data. I can run a high level report to summarize data another employee may need and with a few clicks can drill down to the details needed to create a more in-depth analysis of the data. I also love the flexibility of changing views, measures, dates, etc. with ease without starting from scratch.

I honestly can't think of anything I don't like. Customer Service in very customer-centric and work to use feedback to always make improvements.

Information Availability and speed of access to queries

We cannot link our customer price matrix database to our sales information

This product is easy to use and we create reports quickly.

We wanted to add some features into our existing databases but couldn't do it on our own. We just had training and now we learned how to do that.

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

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

I have been a Phocas user for a couple of years. Being a SHIMS user, we are always looking for software to enhance it and make the end users lives easier. Phocas has been a great fit for us.

We started using the CRM database about 6 months ago. After a somewhat rocky start, the salesforce is finally embracing the technology.

Data is very powerful when used properly. Easy to use once leaned and it's extremely quick to extract important data.

Some bugs still sit in the software. Not a lot but they are annoying when they do pop up.

The software is easy to use and implement. User adoption was very fast. I like that you can quickly and easily build your own database in Designer without an IT resource.

If the data could be real time instead of on sync

I'm able to see various snapshots of all the data that drives my business decisions in one place - and even better - I am able to slice and dice the data in different ways so as to get in depth analysis when needed

Not in real time (at least for my organization) - the data downloads every night so we have to wait until next day to see numbers up until the previous day

Fairly easy to use with data highly configurable

Lack of out of box setup. Lack of point and click to drill into Data.

Easy to use, quick access, daily reporting

Can’t streamline some of the reporting not a timely report process