Prophix One is a finance and accounting platform that provides enterprises a single point of entry and common authentication for financial applications. It uses in-memory cube technology to enable enterprises to handle complex planning tasks built on very large datasets to eliminate barriers to integrated business planning. The platform and its dedicated data store support the use of artificial intelligence (AI) using machine learning (ML) as well as agents to compress planning cycles with better forward intelligence and high participation planning. In 2025, Prophix was rated Exemplary in ISG’s Buyers Guides for business planning, financial consolidation and financial close.
FP&A Plus is the company’s latest version of its business planning software. Prophix was early in addressing the need for enterprises to bring together operational and financial planning across their entire organization. This integration creates a comprehensive business management tool that supports better decision-making and improves organizational and individual business unit performance while respecting financial constraints and objectives. This approach to business planning provides executives and managers with a robust tool that enables them to manage more effectively to improve performance and agility. This method of business planning is infeasible using stand-alone spreadsheets because of their inherent technical limitations.
Despite the business benefits that enterprises can achieve from business-focused planning, our research finds that more than one-half of enterprises rely on spreadsheets to manage their planning and budgeting processes, and a substantial percentage of midsize enterprises use them for close management and financial consolidation. I believe one reason is that despite the limitations of stand-alone spreadsheets, many potential buyers have not found the benefits of a dedicated application to be overwhelmingly better.
The introduction of AI and agents built around technical developments in software engineering over the past decade is markedly improving the cost-benefit assessment of a dedicated platform versus spreadsheets. Higher departmental productivity and greater organizational agility are two reasons why. AI in all of its forms enables enterprises to deal more effectively with uncertainty. The growing list of embedded AI and agent-enabled processes in Prophix’s platform can shorten planning cycles to achieve agility in business operations. During 2025, the company launched Prophix One Intelligence, an AI engine built into the platform with an initial set of agents for budgeting, reporting and modeling, software that can upskill staff and extend the breadth of their capabilities.
FP&A Plus is engineered to take full advantage of a web-based planning platform. For Prophix customers, its Infinix engine running on AWS scales and performs to the needs of the customer, regardless of the scope or complexity of the enterprise or the business planning models. For example, rapid iterations of detailed stock-keeping unit (SKU) level forecasts and their impact on operations and finance are feasible. Staffing-heavy businesses can quickly gauge the effects of a range of wage and benefit scenarios by worker types and locations. The potential impact of tariffs or other forces affecting input costs can be modeled, along with the results of management responses to those changes. The software takes advantage of techniques developed over the past decade to optimize performance and cost, including containerized elastic resource scaling, column stores for rapid data retrieval and bitmap indexing to streamline search and filtering.
An important feature of the Prophix One platform that makes high-performance business possible is its unified data store. We have referred to this, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as a “data pantry.” Unlike a general-purpose construct such as a data warehouse, everything that users of FP&A Plus need is readily available and easily accessible, with labels that are immediately recognized and understood. Connectors automatically pull information from all necessary source systems (such as ERP and CRM) into the platform, transforming it to create a usable unitary source. This addresses a major barrier faced by financial planning and analysis (FP&A) professionals. They often have less time to do forward-looking analysis because the mechanical process of pulling together and collating data takes up so much time that little remains for using data to spot trends, find opportunities and isolate issues to create better-informed forecasts, plans and decisions. Our Analytics and Data Benchmark Research finds that two-thirds of analysts spend considerable time on data preparation and reviewing data for quality and consistency issues, leaving less time for analysis. By substantially eliminating the time required for data preparation and data quality control, financial and business analysts have more time to concentrate on analytical work. Having consistent, reliable data resident on the platform makes automating updates and self-service reporting possible. FP&A Plus has a feature that automates commentary generation for tables. Professionals can have the system write the basic text and then edit it with additional insights or recommendations.
By automating the collection of data, reports and dashboards can be timelier. By broadening the set
To handle the most common aspects of an integrated business plan, the software facilitates collecting and incorporating sales forecasts and workforce plans so that updates to price lists, benefit costs, projected headcount levels and the like are instantly reflected in projected income statements, proforma balance sheets and statements of cash flows, whether these are generated monthly, quarterly or annually. Multiple scenarios driven by key performance metrics or other macro assumptions can be created on the fly and compared side by side. Moreover, having the operational and financial data at hand makes it possible to do product- or channel-level profitability analysis to make informed decisions around pricing strategies. This enables enterprises to adopt a profitability management discipline, a more effective approach to widening margins compared to having profitability objectives.
One issue that FP&A professionals confront in bringing together financial and operational plans is orchestrating the process to support rapid reforecasting cycles. Prophix has an easy-to-configure workflow manager to enable time-challenged administrators to manage by exception, letting the system handle routine matters.
Prophix One also supports financial consolidation and some close management functions. The financial records of an enterprise must be reviewed periodically and summarized to create financial statements that inform executives and interested third parties of the organization’s financial condition and performance. A consolidation of the financial records and other departmental close processes involves an intricate set of repeated processes that must be performed in a prescribed order and fashion. Enterprise software enables finance and accounting departments to be more productive by automating calculations, coordinating the execution of processes and facilitating communication among participants. Although the process can be performed using electronic spreadsheets (just as it had been done with the paper kind decades ago), consolidation software becomes a necessity when an enterprise has more than a handful of legal entities, subsidiaries, joint ventures or other forms of ownership or control of operating units, or operates in locations with different currencies and legal reporting requirements.
ISG Research defines close management software as applications that support the timely and efficient completion of close cycle tasks, especially automating reconciliations and performing process management functions. Close management software has improved in recent years, reducing workloads through automation and enhancing ease of use while providing a single work area for staff accountants to reduce administrative overhead. Systems now offer more effective collaboration features to smooth the process and ensure resiliency, including secure data sharing and centralized document storage for working papers and supporting evidence for audits.
I’ve written extensively about the potential for AI and generative AI (GenAI) to have a significant positive impact on finance department productivity and reshape the role of FP&A. There’s almost no end to the ways technology can enhance departmental productivity. This goes beyond simple efficiency gains to include important contributors to extending the capabilities of the staff to improve the performance of the entire enterprise. Over the next five years, the feasible and cost-efficient use cases for AI and GenAI in finance organizations will depend heavily on their foundational technology. Prophix One and FP&A Plus are designed to support these advances. I strongly recommend that midsize enterprises that manage their forecasting, planning, budgeting and reporting using stand-alone spreadsheets shift to a cloud-based planning platform. Those that are currently using an on-premises dedicated application also should consider moving to the cloud. In either case, I recommend that they evaluate Prophix for this purpose as well as its other financial management capabilities.
Regards,
Robert Kugel