Power BI Vs Phocas

Power BI provides a tiered product offering that relies on customer self-evaluation, which can prove challenging without proper guidance or prior in-depth knowledge of the Microsoft suite. You can take advantage of the free add-on to an existing subscription or even the $10 USD per user per month option but be prepared to invest significant time and full-time in-house resources to figure out if the capabilities match what you need. Once you encounter limitations (data sharing and warehousing, data interrogation), you will need to continue upgrading to a higher-priced tier as your needs grow. Resulting in increasing costs without a clear understanding of the TCO.

While Power BI is a useful tool, it is difficult to set up and maintain. This process falls to the consumer to self-manage. Connecting to Microsoft ERP data sources will run relatively smoothly for modest datasets, however consolidating multiple, diverse data sources outside of Microsoft is not reliable, if at all possible. Plus, you’ll need to factor in data warehousing costs as this is not supplied. One of the biggest challenges is the volume of learning required to understand how Power BI software works as well as determining whether the capabilities align with your business requirements. Without in-house expertise, a data analysis expression (DAX) language expert will be required for data preparation and to build and deploy a Power BI environment. If your data is on-premise and behind your firewall, a Power BI gateway is needed to copy your data into the cloud. There are no dedicated Microsoft support services included in the pricing, other than online forums, videos and documentation which can take significant time and resources to digest and apply that knowledge.

If you do happen to have full-time IT specialists or data analysts in-house who can dedicate their time to deployment and ongoing maintenance, they will become the primary resource for creating and adjusting datasets, reports and dashboards. It’s worth considering whether such valuable technical resources should be dedicated to tasks that are automated in purpose-built platforms like Phocas. Alternatively, to outsource technical expertise, a Microsoft consultant can cost between $150 - $200 USD per hour. To give you an idea of how your TCO can quickly escalate, a standard dashboard can take 6-8 hours of coding skills to build. In Phocas, this can be achieved by non-technical users in a matter of minutes.

Phocas offers a dedicated team who work alongside your in-house representatives to implement a pre-built cloud-based solution that is tailored to your business needs and goals. Secure data warehousing for multiple sources is all part of the service and data is mapped to ensure it can be matched for seamless updates and ongoing validation. Multiple data sources are consolidated (financial, non-financial, third party), and once your data is live, full training is provided so technical and non-technical users can hit the ground running. In addition, Phocas employ dedicated support teams located in offices globally. They not only provide technical support but also offer guidance and support that aligns with wider business objectives to help achieve your goals and generate a return on your investment. Essentially, Phocas does the heavy lifting for you, achieving in a matter of weeks what can often take the better part of a year to complete.

Don't just take our word for it:

“Phocas is true BI, built to provide data analytics, while tools like Power BI are an empty box that requires you to build it yourself. You have to start from scratch, and you need to be an expert in that software.”
— Tim Devenish, Managing Director at Strongdor.

“I love Phocas reporting; this has helped our branches and operations in a big way and we can see our company performance as a whole at once. No need to check different reports to analyze data. Phocas software is highly user-friendly compared to Microsoft Power BI.” 
— Benoy James, Group IT Manager at Motovac.

Power BI is not designed to handle heavy-duty data processing, multi-entity business requirements, large datasets or complex queries.

If you want to go beyond operational data analysis, consolidating data from financial reporting and budgeting and forecasting can be extremely difficult. This results in a continued reliance on manual data consolidation which is time-consuming, error-prone and can lead to subsequent security risks. Whether you’re allocating this additional manual processing to a dedicated in-house resource or outsourcing to a consultant, it will once again continue to increase the TCO. 

Phocas software is designed to ingest business complexity effectively and efficiently. It can handle large, diverse data sets or even create multiple iterations of auditable financial statements to match multi-entity requirements.

Phocas connects operational and financial data enabling cross-functional analysis. This results in technical and non-technical users developing a comprehensive understanding of whole-business performance. Essentially, Phocas' robust BI platform takes care of the complexity, while the intuitive interface makes it easy to access and analyze one trusted source of data truth. So, as your business grows and the complexity increases, Phocas will continue to ingest and comprehend this information to provide you with a 360-degree view of business performance.

Power BI is highly technical to use.

If your aim is to keep analytics under the control of the IT function, this might work well. If you want to empower users across your business to become self-sufficient in data analytics, the technical skills required to effectively use Power BI will hinder this significantly.

Dashboards and reports are complex and time-consuming to build, which creates a bottle neck when relying on in-house experts or external consultants. Once a report or dashboard is built, they are essentially a read-only tool; data interrogation is not possible without a data analyst and even then, this requires hard coding. Reviewing real-time data on-the-fly prior to a sales call or to extract critical data during boardroom meetings is not possible. This would require preparation by data analysts well in advance, limiting your ability to quickly address issues before they escalate or to take advantage of opportunities.

Phocas empowers everyone to perform advanced data analytics within just a few clicks.

You can build data sets and create customizable reports and dashboards in minutes, then present insights to the wider business using customizable visualization tools - scorecards, Sparklines, graphs and charts. A unique analysis grid with a familiar Excel format, provides an intuitive ad-hoc analysis layer so users of all abilities can interrogate data. Drill down from macro to transactional-level data to answer your own questions; analyze sales data by customer, product or region to identify trends and spot outliers. Data sharing is not restricted internally or externally via tiered pricing, however sensitive information is protected via global data security that is set up per user. This enables layered permission controls so users can only view and interrogate what they are permitted to.

Power BI's desktop (free) version requires individual downloads to PC desktops or laptops (excluding Mac) to create reports. This makes it difficult to govern multiple users with individual connections to data sources – often containing confidential information. Reviewing static reports that are then manipulated in Excel creates version control issues, making it extremely difficult to manage and consolidate. This is an error-prone process that can lead to potential risks during compliance audits.

If you decide to upgrade to a Power BI cloud-based pricing tier, security is provided at a dataset level. This means that security needs to be defined for each dataset you create, leaving room for human error. DAX capabilities and a significant amount of administration effort are required to achieve this, which puts pressure on in-house resources, or increases ongoing consultant costs and TCO.

Phocas is a cloud-based solution that provides enterprise-grade security as a baseline regardless of the number of business users.

Access and security are defined and provided at a user level. Once this is set up, users will only be able to view and edit what they are permitted to. This type of layered permission control protects confidential information while users are analyzing data. It also enables task assignment and feedback requests, improving collaboration. The administrative workload is dramatically reduced as is the room for human error.