Phocas Software reviews

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.

I love the customization of creating reports. Our users enjoy the independence of creating their own reports and the flexibility they have with customizing the structure of any data pulled.

We have a partner login within our license, and support for this add-on isn't yet where it needs to be in order to foster growth in this area.

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.

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.

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.

Ever Since the team has implemented Phocas,

I have been able to track my sales progress and been able to keep up with my goals and successes.

this program also allows me to have my track record available and see where I need improvement and have a clear written history in terms of graphs and charts as to what has been done in the past, and present.

the only problem I have with this problem is that sometimes , the program freezes, lags and does not upload the data from the day prior.

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 apparently limitless possibilities. With our custom insulation solutions business, our metrics and analytics are unique, and Phocas has kept up, nay, surpassed our demands!

There is not a con to the software, the con comes with my time being able to dig in and leverage all of the cool factors.
My analogy: my car has many special cool features, but most of the time, I simply get in it and drive.
Need to stop, read the manual, and truly put it (and expect excellent performance) to the test!

The charts and graphs are easy to read and understand

Its hard to navigate drilling down into the sub category's to sort information.

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...

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.

Phocas makes it very easy to get data out in front of people. Users don't have to be super smart with data, however if they are at least mildly smart with data then it isn't just an easy solution to get data in front of them but then becomes incredibly powerful. Users will feel empowered to be able to dig into anything from high level sales to individual transactions.

The visualizations on Dashboards is lacking and could be improved. Also if you have some incredibly complex calculations then sometimes the way to implement that in Phocas isn't super straightforward.

Easy to use and understand. Logical thought processes to pull your data.

When using the Nesting feature you have to be right on the "Drag here" in order to have your other dimension stick. Sometimes you must try three or four times before it holds.

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

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

building dashboards is easy, building reports (favorites) is easy.

The data. Just like any other reporting software. If you don't have a good structured dataset (source files) then it makes it harder. That's not a bad thing about THIS software, though ;)

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.

Phocas is like Legos. With a little creativity, you can build almost anything you'll ever need to find and solve problems with stats. Simple but consistent and powerful.

The product always gives quick, accurate results; however, the support team does not. We get very custom with how we use the BI, and it feels like high-end users know more about the product than the advocates. It takes time to get details worked out on new databases, and we have been skipped over for upgrades in the past.

Phocas quickly converts data from Job Management and Eclipse into simple, easy to use, customizable dashboards to help monitor all aspects of our business.

The Phocas team has been very helpful with listening to our needs and training, facilitating change requests, and assisting us with problems.

allowed data analysis that improved our ERP system. enabled decisions that increased sales

remembering how to use all of the features

Easy to use, quick access, daily reporting

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

Sales reports, inventory reports for customers

Challenging to learn, glad that you have had training

The ability to view our sales data in a easily consumed and manipulated form is invaluable.

The only unpleasant aspects about the software is certain data can only be accessed if provided from a third party agency. In this particular situation, you aren't dealing with Phocas' excellent service team and might have to wait longer periods of time to get what you want.