Phocas reviews

It is easy to use for all sales people. Lots of information at your fingertips.

Having all this data you need to understand d how to use it. This is not always easy.

We have used Phocas since 2008 and have always liked how fast we can generate reports. The reports that I have setup to e-mail keep me informed on key indicators in our business. We started using CRM a couple of years ago and like how easy it is for our salespeople to enter calls on their mobile device.

I would like to see a better way to track and run reports on leads in CRM. Sometimes upgrades and support take a little longer the we would like.

Once you have been shown how to use this software, it can be a very useful tool, especially for us as CEs who aren't directly involved with the Sales side of the business.

Unless someone is a pro on Phocas, it is difficult to navigate your way around it and completely understand how to use it.

This software allows me to gather databases from all over the organization and present the, to our users via dashboard/report or let them drive their own reporting.

It was a bit difficult to understand the Sync/dbdesigner part since documentation on this was a bit vague

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.

User-friendliness. It's very intuitive and easy to use. It has a nice clean and modern look and feel.

It doesn't have all the data in it we would like and sometimes it is difficult to get that data into Phocas. That may be more of an Eclipse limitation though.

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.

Phocas provided an ideal solution for producing the same views of information for Different job roles using the permissions in the background. This reduced our dependance on Excel reporting by around 60%

Phocas is more a visualisation tool rather than deep dive and planning is necessary to ensure output views meet the expected results, particular around columnar structure. That said it has had nothing but a positive impact on the Business reporting consumption by the masses.

Ease of use , ability to develop our own customised views , one change updates all consumers of the views , scalable - we can add more data and create relationships to enrich existing views to the consumer , Enable better decision making data in dashboard views allowing the consumer to pic and choose what is important today .
We have never looked back - we chose Phocas in 2013 to feed our front end business with tailor made views of data to enable swift decision making - we developed our support team to self create views from data feed through to data visualisation - this replaced our Excel and VBA sheets that were people hungry to produce - now we simply load our data periodically and the consumer can a see "all they want to see when they want to see it "

Understanding how the background of the product , as we decided from day one that we would be self sufficient in all our development needs and not many businesses had taken this approach with Phocas at that time.

What I most like about Phocas is I can get to the information I need by how I think about it. While someone else in my company can get to the same exact information in a totally different manner. The great thing is we get to the same exact information.

The thing I like least is the inability to print nice looking dashboards. We have sales meetings and the managers want to print each salesmen's information from a master dashboard. This way it can be handed out to each person so they can see their information as it is talked about generally in the meeting.

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.

I am most excited about the ability to draw in different strands of information from the various software platforms we operate as part of the business. We generate so much data that frankly its too intimidating to consider analysis of it all without the services of Phocas

I would like to see more integration in the CRM side of the software. For instance our ERP is ultimately our primary CRM system aswell, so we manage the contacts there, but they do not automatically sync through to the contacts tab of the CRM section. Some further automation from existing systems would be nice.

The support team is great and very helpful. The software is very easy to learn for new users and people that aren't comfortable with an analytics tool. The tool is very intuitive and you can start doing analysis very quickly.

The Custom function does add depth of functionality, but it's hard to do certain formulas like Maxs, Mins, or Standard Deviations. The amount of graphics and charts is increasing but it would still be nice to have more.

Phocas is incredibly easy to use and helps you dig into an type of business analytics you can think of for your business.

There are not many of CONS that I have with Phocas, but the biggest issue I have is the lack of graphics for dashboards and the ability to truly customize those graphics. Also, the graphics can be a little quirky at times.

Ease of use and navigation, ability to customise and a perfect support team!

The functionality is awesome, only think I can think of is to give more options with custom formatting dashboards.

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.

the ease of obtaining information in a usable way, and the speed at which we can get analysis of the data has been a game changer for our business! The dashboards are key for our teams and the alerts take the day to day thinking out of my hands!

There is nothing negative about this software from my perspective!

I like the instant, fluid information that lets me quickly get the information I want when I want it how I want it, sales me hours a week, what's not to like!

I wish to learn more about it to maximise on its benefits but find it a little expensive to do the course, other than that its brilliant.

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...

One Click Functionality. User friendly. The ability to access data wherever you are in the world.

As BSS hold a vast amount of information sometimes we have issues viewing the data. This might be an internal or external network issue.

The system is great to use and easy , I like the fact I can customize reports and dashboards to suit my business.

I have no issues with the software, the system works well for us.

Find out extended history on a customer; get transactional data over any specified time period; review usage by product category, vendor, customer, grade, order type, etc.

Can view on iPad, but not real clean: limiting fields in some of the functions tend to overlap making it impossible to do. Would like to abbreviate column headings, but can’t.