Pros and Cons of Phocas Software (Straight Talk Review)

Phocas Software (also known as “Phocas”) is a platform for data analytics designed to help business leaders and data professionals visualize their performance and revenue. This platform is prevalent because it pulls data from various ERPs and business systems to organize and analyze it.

But is Phocas worth it? In this guide, we’ll break down the pros and cons of Phocas, what the software does, and whether or not this platform is worth it for data analytics.

What is Phocas?

Phocas is a platform for business intelligence and data analytics. Phocas offers findings instantly and assists users in finding info. It provides a straightforward yet effective analytical capacity that quickly transforms data into a chart, graph, or map and is intended for non-technical users. It displays information on sales, inventories, projections, pricing, profit margins, budgets, and more on a local, regional, or worldwide scale.

Phocas helps users uncover new sales possibilities, increase corporate efficiency, and make data-driven choices. The platform has been used by more than 150 staff and 1,000 clients on three continents as a result of its innovation in data discovery.

Phocas is a straightforward tool with strong analytical capabilities that can quickly turn data into a map, chart, or graph. It is also meant to be used by non-technical people.

Business intelligence company Phocas is established in the UK and has office locations there, as well as in the US and Australia. The vendor claims that providing a cutting-edge data discovery solution has kept 97 percent of its customers.

The following are just a few of the many features that Phocas provides:

• Web-based interface for administration
• External data snapshot
• Memory-based data model
• OLAP (Pre-processed cube representation)
• ROLAP (SQL-layer querying)
• Reporting from Multiple Data Sources
• Dictionary layer and data warehouse
• ETL Competency
• Scheduler ETL
• Personalized dashboards
• Report templates
• Drill-down analytics
• Predictive modeling
• Lots of formatting options
• Report sharing and collaborative capabilities

While these features are undoubtedly rich, no business intelligence platform is perfect. Let’s look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of Phocas.

NOTE: The pros and cons below are some of the feedback we discovered on various review websites and analyst articles. Some of these items may have been addressed in new releases since the comment was mentioned and some may not apply to your specific use case/organization. As always, we recommend doing your own due diligence via a trial and evaluation process to see what works best for you.

The Pros

Phocas has plenty of potential benefits:

• Its primary advantages are Phocas’s capacity to quickly acquire data from many sources, intelligent data discovery features, and an interactive dashboard that offers visual summaries. Details are provided below:
• Within a few seconds, the system may provide crucial information on finances, profit margins, inventory, pricing, predictions, and local, national, or international sales. The platform enables customers to make data interrogation, data consolidation, modeling, and trend discovery to keep ahead of the competition.
• Phocas can help users find accurate facts in real-time, making it ideal for investigating specifics and taking in the larger picture. Regarding processing necessary business inquiries, the system follows the users’ reasoning. The program provides answers while raising new questions and examining new possibilities that the organization might not have considered.
• Phocas dashboards give businesses beautiful visual summaries of their financial data. Users may quickly develop, tweak, and revise an interactive dashboard without involving the IT department and engaging with their coworkers.
• Phocas offers a wide range of features similar business intelligence tools might lack.
• The platform offers a ton of supported data sources, from Oracle to text files to SAP Hana to Google Analytics and everything in between.
• Phocas excels in analyzing data in depth, obtaining detailed information, and providing it in a report. Drilling down into the data is also quite simple to accomplish.
• Phocas may display data pulled from the database up to the minute.
• It makes it very simple for users to build and see various dashboard types. The dashboards are also aesthetically beautiful and excellent as platforms for visualizing data.
• The platform provides access to several systems in one location for data extraction. Your ERP will likely be Phocas compatible if you utilize one.
• The ability to manage people and their dashboards is strong, and creating custom reports is straightforward.
• It is crucial for firms in every industry to track sales figures in great detail.
• Data is refreshed daily, and updates are timely.

The Cons of Phocas

While Phocas is a pretty good tool, there are some downsides to consider:

• The primary product hasn’t received many new features recently. Development appears to be concentrated on brand-new subscription-based goods.
• For back-end configuration, the designer mode requires complete focus. To master it, you may need to do a few test runs and use the numerous assistance videos. The CRM system is currently rather simplistic.
• That a “Market Variance” option is not available right now. Although Phocus’s Market Mode is a very effective tool for quickly identifying over and under indexes, it only supports one period. Thus, users must repeat their query several times to obtain the desired results.
• It would be beneficial if the data were more organized when you export it to spreadsheets or CSV files. The data is delicate right now; it just needs a little tidying up before it can be used.
• In Phocas, transactional data organization needs improvement. The sequence of the dimensions and the attributes therein determine how transaction data is exported; being able to customize this order for different exports would save time manually rearranging using Excel.
• Many online critics of Phocas have highlighted that the platform itself is not the most user-friendly and that the learning curve is challenging.
• It must be simpler to connect to many kinds of databases with Phocas.
• In some circumstances, Phocas’ data needs to be updated more quickly.
• It must offer tools for making better graphs and charts.
• Dashboards’ “print” feature might use some improvement.
• Currently, there is no single sign-on option available.
• Daily data set dumps might consume a lot of storage space.

Bottom Line: Is Phocas Worth It?

Phocas could be a decent platform for those interested in better business intelligence and data analytics with visualization capabilities. It’s an excellent tool for drilling down data quickly and reasonably efficiently.

However, the user-friendliness of this platform does not make it easy to integrate immediately. There are also many minor functional issues that organizations could run into while using this platform.

One would need to designate a Phocus pro to handle most of the work on the platform to avoid roadblocks with other members of one’s data team. The unpredictable printing feature can also be a no-go for many organizations. At this time, we’d recommend shopping around for alternative data analytics platforms before settling for Phocas.

How Can Yurbi Help?

Phocas has helped thousands of businesses and millions of business owners execute their essential daily operations, which is why even though they have cons that are concerning for some, they still choose to use them.

But there is no best BI tool, there’s only what’s best for your organization.

Enter Yurbi, a great business intelligence tool that can help you with your data visualization and other business intelligence needs–at a fraction of the cost of mainstream BI tools, such as Phocas.

With Yurbi, you get all the benefits of robust security, white labelling, embedded analytics, ad-hoc querying, visualization, dashboards, and more in a way ordinary people with no computer programming background can easily understand. From simple graphs and tables to more innovative ways of presenting your data and visualizing it for a larger audience, Yurbi has got you covered.

Not only that, but they are also accommodating to other business intelligence operations and functions. Yurbi is a one-stop shop for all your business intelligence needs without hurting your finances.

Reach out to us by setting up a meeting or trying our live demo session for absolutely zero dollars. See you!