Board Reviews

We use it for budget development and revenue forecasting, and it's performing quite well right now. 

There have been some minor hiccups, not with the BOARD platform itself, but it's just the learning, getting familiar with the product, and the end-user accepting the application. In a government organization, there has been some struggle to get people to use the tool, versus what they've used before.

I don't think it's the learning curve, because the way New Brain designed the application for us, it's fairly user friendly. I think it's more of a hesitancy to stop inputting things on Excel spreadsheets and then inputting things into the BOARD software itself. We're only about a year and a half into it, and what I'm finding is that they kept both. They've kept their Excel sheets. So they are doing double entry. They're were doing entry into Excel as well as entry into the BOARD system, because they didn't quite trust the application yet. Now that we're in year two, the second budget season with the system, they've stopped using some of those Excel spreadsheets. They're relying more on the BOARD application itself.

The way that we designed the personal service forecasting module - about 80% of our operating budget is personal-service related in government. The way that it allows us to take all the variables in, and do a lot of "what if" scenario planning on it, I think is the greatest benefit.

For me, because I do a lot of the administration of the system, it's just how easy it was to set up and how easy it is to maintain.

Being only about a year and a half into using the tool, I don't think I know enough of what's still possible. I'm excited to learn about the e-learning tool and the community that's just starting out.

If I was to look at it, from my point of view, there's a lot of report writing that we have to do in the government sector, so maybe explaining how we integrate with, for example, a publishing software, would be helpful.

It wasn't because of BOARD, it was more because we have integrated it with our ERP system, and we have made changes in our ERP system without filtering those through to our BOARD software. So it wasn't BOARD, it was really a self-inflicted kind situation.

The platform has worked wonderfully for us. There haven't been any issues that I've seen with the platform. In fact, we're looking at - maybe in the next year, or next two years - integrating more into it, really expanding what we're currently using it for, which is just budgets; to look at it and see what else we can do with it. It's very customizable.

I think there's a lot more that we could be doing. Right now it's just really budgets that we're using it for. I'm really interested in learning how we can use BEAM for our revenue forecasting, or revenue predictive analytics; how we use that in a government setting. The tools that we have now are really just Excel. 

Excellent. We've only done it through their online technical support, but we have had where we couldn't just solve it through an email, and they have been really very good about setting up time for us to make service calls with them. I love their technical support.

The budget system that we were using prior to investing in BOARD was written back in the early 90s, and it had a hard-coded date in there that it would not let us to do any forecasting beyond the year 2017. So we were forced into looking at another application. I spent about a year looking at applications. 

I chose BOARD because of the way that I was able to change it over time and integrate, not only a line-item budget, but also a strategic budget. I was able to bring in all those other pieces into it, and it wasn't just strictly an accounting stream. I am able to do more of the predictive analytics and the forecasting, and move the city into that direction instead of just the numbers.

We worked with New Brain. New Brain made it really easy for us to learn the tool. They spent a lot of time with us just talking through the business. Working in the Finance department, we had to integrate - since the Finance department is decentralized, the capital budgets were done in a different department. New Brain really helped me work with the capital folks to identify their business process. They didn't even know all of their business process. So it was really nice that New Brain was able to help with all of those conversations, and help us even streamline our business processes within capital.

With New Brain, it was all about their experience with other local municipalities, and working with governments in fund accounting. Fund accounting is quite different from private business accounting. That's what drew us to New Brain, not only the BOARD application, but also their background in working with government.

Technical support is definitely a 10 out of 10. The system solution is about a nine out of 10, and the only reason why I would give it a nine and not a 10, is that it still takes IT folks to really support it. It's not totally able to be supported within Finance. Given the amount of resources that a government has, we have a very small IT staff, and the departments are more relied upon to do their own IT. That's the only reason why I would give it a nine.

I like this solution because it's so versatile, you can really model it after your specific business practices. It's not the case that you might have to change your business practices to fit into it.

We use BOARD for financial statements. 

It is performing great. My managers love it. It is easy for them to look at their budget and review their expenses at budget time so they can know what to budget for the following year, but also to keep track of their expenses during the year and not go over their budgets. 

It has streamlined the organization.

It has benefited us by reducing time. 

Also, we are able to easily export data. When directors need financial information, we can go in the system and export the data, then send it out so they have it ready and available. If they are not in the office, we can email it to them. In addition, all the managers are now more on top of their expenses and their budget, so it is better streamlined. 

It makes it easier for me since a manager can actually look at their budget and account, then understand it. Also, where it used to take me three days at the beginning of the year to create the new financial statement, now it is a matter of minutes because all the data is in the system. 

If we could upload other data, e.g., pivot tables which can be done in BOARD already, that we have pre-existing and have that data distribute to more complex spreadsheets, I would like that going forward.

No stability issues. Everything has been good.

We did have some downtime because there are only two staff members in my division. My managers continuously use it, except we do not have the time to continuously update it.

No scalability issues.

The person that we worked with, Roberto, understood what we needed and helped us when we had questions. We felt at ease and that we could always go back to him, email or call him. He was always ready and available to help us out.

We have not used technical support.

We were just using spreadsheet.

The initial setup was very complex for us. 

I am looking forward to the upgrade for BOARD 11. We have to learn all the back-end of the setup. We do not have the company that comes in with everything already preset. We have to learn it and set it up ourselves. If we dedicate the time to it, we will get it.

We did look at a competitor.

If you want to streamline your business and reduce hourly time using the creation of spreadsheets or other financial reports that they should go for BOARD because it drastically reduces time. It will also make your financials ready and available for any type of financial planning or reporting. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We needed somebody who would understand what we wanted and the output that we needed. 

Budgeting. It's performing very well.

The ease of designing. The ease of making it happen on a daily basis. What I mean by that is catching up daily. You just schedule the report and off it goes.

It has a lot of valuable features. Primary is its flexibility and versatility and, obviously, functionality goes along with that. Plus, it does that at a small footprint in the file servers, and does it very efficiently.

It's outstanding, because I don't know of any issues that we've had.

It will scale to whatever you need. You just need to find somebody to build the SQL statement and you're all set.

We have used technical support but not in the last couple or three years. We've had them come in and do training. The training group is very knowledgeable, and we're very happy with them. As far as the phone call support, like I said, we haven't used them in a few years, but it was very effective, as I recall.

It gets real difficult to use a lot of Excel spreadsheets, especially when you have 10 or 15 or more people using different spreadsheets, trying to get them all together. Not only that, but are their formulas correct? Don't get me wrong, Excel is a wonderful product, but this eliminates all that. 

Once you have somebody look at it and test the product, you only have to do it once, and then, you don't have to worry about a spreadsheet coming in from someplace else that isn't right.

When selecting or working with a vendor the most important criteria are

• performance
• functionality
• price goes along with that too.

The concept of how it works was a little bit hard for me to take, because I'm an old IT-er. Once I got past that, the complexity disappeared. Configuring the functionality of a report, for instance, you can get very simple or you can get very complicated. The point is, it can be whatever you need it to be.

There is a learning curve as there is with any product, no matter what the vendor tells you. But I would not say it's anything out of the ordinary, especially if you have newer folks working on it. What I mean by that is people that are new to the industry, younger folks. Like I said, us older folks have a difficult time grabbing onto that concept. But once that happened, it was easy.

There were several. There were a couple that were in the cloud, and we didn't like the cloud aspect of them. That was four or five years ago.

My purpose is telling them what they need and writing the initial SQL and building the capsule. Once I do that, I'm done, and then they just go off. I'm not a day-to-day user.

In terms of advice to a colleague who is looking at a similar solution, I don't know what their actual needs are, but my advice would be to go forward with this product. Don't be afraid to get some initial training, because they didn't want to supply that for us initially. My advice would be to get the initial training.

Our primary use case is corporate reporting. We are implementing it in phases. We did finance, then we did what we call our direct consumer group. Now, we are working on our production case goods (inventory).

For the most part, it is performing okay. I am having some performance problems with the data. We are going back to all the transactions by day. Therefore, we might need to have a little help from our consultants with this at some point. We have not yet spoken with technical support about this issue as it is a brand new problem.

Our data is now more structured. Between our data warehouse and BOARD, which are both brand new, we now have a more structured data view with more accurate, timely data.

We can also build reports super fast.

You can build reports pretty quickly. 

We do not use BOARD as our main data store. We have a data warehouse that BOARD consumes data from. Therefore, our data's fairly organized before it comes into BOARD. All of the dimensions and fact tables are all lined up already in the data warehouse. Thus, it is an easy task to get the data into BOARD.

If we build a ton of procedural stuff, it is not good at alerting us to what may have failed, like logging and job steps. It is our understanding from the jobs we continue to run, even though one step might have failed, that functionality is not what we would like to see. 

We would like to see it stop and report that there was an issue, and that we need to resolve it from that point moving forward. In general, we would like to see better logging in the procedural world as we currently find it deficient in procedural areas. 

I have not seen any stability issues.

We have not tried to scale it much as we do not have that many users. At the moment, we have around 10 maximum. However, this could change.

It is hard because we are not speaking on the phone. We are going back and forth with emails, and I think it is getting lost in transition on a couple of the issues that I have had because it is an email chain versus a phone call or a chat. Emails are hard for technical stuff. 

However, I have not used the technical support that much, because we are still engaged with the consultants, not yet switching completely to the technical support. We have weekly calls with the consultants. They are a type of technical support.

It was before my time at the company.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

We evaluated Tableau, Power BI, and BOARD, then chose BOARD. 

Try to use all the out-of-the-box functionality. Try to use BOARD for what it is good at doing and do not tread outside its capabilities, because then you start running into issues, such as writing procedures. When possible, do not write procedures. Procedures are necessary, but we are backing away from writing them. We are trying to use BOARD out-of-the-box.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: The consultants have always been helpful. They make sure that we are successful. I appreciate that.

The primary use case is developing a demand planning/collaboration platform. It's performing well.

The collaboration part. That is the tool that our client is really using.

I would like to see a better Web client, where the controls work the same way as in the Windows client. I do think that the focus is now on the Web, so it should be improved upon.

I think the stability can be improved upon, but overall it is stable.

We've seen downtime from our side, that we did not design it the way that it was going to be used. But I also see that we have had to take away features because it was not supported in the way that we wanted it. We're using it in the client versus Web; in the client it works and in the Web it doesn't. So we had to pull certain controls off the screen.

I think it's very scalable. We hardly see the impact on the tool, the CPU, the memory, when the users are connecting through it, through the Web. The Windows client is a different story. It's not scalable at all, so we decided to go with the Web.

There is room for improvement. In the beginning there was a struggle reaching the right person, especially in the same time zone. That has been resolved. I think it's getting better over the months, but it can still be improved upon.

The company that I work for is based in Italy, so all the support was coming through Italy. Now, the support now is U.S.-based, which is better for us.

When selecting a vendor, in general, the most important factors are their

• being responsive
• being truthful.

If I have an issue, I don't care if they say, "We cannot fix it," or, "We'll fix it in a later version." Communicate that.

My advice would be, you should seriously consider this solution.

We started using BOARD as part of a solution. We're developing using BOARD to go into implementation for our customers.

In terms of performance, it's still pretty new to us. It's good. We know BOARD is very powerful, but there is a big learning curve that we still have to get through.

There are definitely a lot of benefits we're still discovering. We have our own software but our reporting functionality and different workflows are not as flexible and mature as what BOARD can do. That's why we have it.

It's very powerful. BOARD is a good platform. Without actually programming, you can develop a workflow and solutions for a lot of things.

Again, it's very powerful, but there is also a big learning curve. It should be a little more intuitive.

In development we have issues for which we have had to open tickets. It's part of the learning process. We don't know where exactly it's going wrong. It's not quite intuitive sometimes.

We're starting with two projects; we expect many more new projects that we're going to partner on with BOARD.

We were doing more home-grown development. Our collaboration piece, again, is not as powerful, as flexible, nor can it expand in the future, as much as BOARD can.

BOARD is a very good solution to compared to other reporting/BI tools out there. Also, because we are based in Boston and BOARD's headquarters is in Boston, I think helped make it an easy choice. And within our company, on the European side - it's an Italian company - they already have a relationship with BOARD.

When selecting a vendor the most important criteria are the 

• software features
• support
• education they provide to help the internal resources get up to speed.

Personally, I think the setup and the concept is intuitive, but once when you get into detail, try to get to a solution, that's where the challenge is.

I would tell a colleague the same thing we're experiencing. BOARD is very powerful, flexible, but it takes an initial learning curve.

Our primary use case is for forecasting and budgeting. We budget capital expenditures, the full P&L financial statement. We have our top-level VPs enter their driver rules and then Finance goes on the back-end and calculates the gross margin impact of that. We capture operational expenses down to the vendor level. We also do all of management reporting.

The performance has been great so far.

The benefits are 

• getting the data in one spot
• the ability to report dynamically
• version control.

I think it's flexible. I chose this solution because, even though it wasn't out-of-the-box, you can customize it, and the long-term growth potential of the software is where I see the value.

More export to Excel functionality. Right now, we're having to build within the cloud-based platform, as well as build within the Excel add-in, because the export to Excel is somewhat ugly. So we're doing both simultaneously.

So far so good.

I think it's very scalable. Again, that's why we chose it, because I think there are endless possibilities to do more. Right now, we're just using it for FP&A-type functions. But the BI functionality, which is the core business, I think is tremendous.

We were just using Excel, there were version control issues, mistakes on copy/paste. We needed a dynamic solution that would be accurate.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are 

• customer service and level of support
• the ability for a non-IT person to maintain the system 
• long-term growth in functionality - I don't want something that's going to be out-dated three years from now.

The setup was so-so (somewhere between straightforward and complex). I think if you are IT-savvy, I think you can get it good enough. It's definitely meant for an end-user to be able to be a power user in the system.

The final decision came down between Borg and Tagetik. We chose it because BOARD was a sandbox, instead of out-of-the-box. Tagetik is great, it's ready to go, but three years from now, that's all it is, that's all it's ever going to be, just financial reporting. I was looking for something that can change over time.

I think that from talking with other customers here at the BOARDVille 2018 user conference, your consultant, if you're using a BOARD consultant, I think that that person is very important. Also, just allow ample time, because it is a sandbox, the startup time is going to be more considerable than out-of-the-box solutions.

We implement the solution. We have about 50 customers, mainly around budgeting, planning, or supply-chain orientated.

In terms of its performance, our customers are very happy.

Better integrating of operational and financial processes. Driving everything to reduce working capital and inventory. Big things, as opposed to just deficiencies.

The ability to do Write-back and visualization, with minimal IT development orientation.

I'd like to see a more passive report user for enterprise report writers who aren't particularly technical, so you could really get it out there to literally every employee, or every customer.

It's good. I feel it's stable in our client base, and I'm quite confident that the new version will increase the scalability.

I think it is scalable. We have small customers, we have large customers. And it seems to go with the growth of the process and the data. We haven't really tested it for large volumes of big data yet. That's what we're exploiting with the new version when it comes.

The initial set up is really rapid, quite quick. It's simple, it's IT-driven, typically.

It's got that combination of everything. I'm a business person predominantly, so I don't like having technical solutions. And it's something even I - and I'm not a consultant - can  deploy. I like that about it.

I'd still recommend that you need an experienced practitioner to take you through a well-designed solution. It's not about the technology, I think it's about the experience that people bring to designing a solution: building the data architecture, integration; leveraging their smarts. At least the first time, work with a partner.

We are a supply chain software provider. We have been using BOARD to create a collaborative platform for users to modify and make edits. This is the primary use case, along with our clients. Also, the flexibility has been great and the performance has been optimal. 

Our organization doesn't use a dynamic feed, but our clients have improved a lot in terms of coordination and communication. This has improved their internal performance. 

The reporting part has been very valuable as the capabilities of the tool do not have to change graphs, change how grids are displayed, and can create reports on the fly. These are things that our customers tend to like. 

It is snappy, and it is quick. 

• We are looking for ways to distinguish zeros versus nulls in BOARD. 
• We are looking at ways to improve how we deal with security in BOARD and other similar things. 

The stability has been fine. We have an additional challenge because we have to integrate it not only with where we are pulling the data, but with our own technology, as if we are implementing three systems. This has been challenging, but we are slowly improving on it. Hopefully, future implementations will be quick. This downtime is mainly due to our learning curve.

It is highly scalable.

BOARD has been very supportive, though we still have to find a way to extract as much knowledge from them as possible.

I personally do not develop in BOARD. We have been investing in our own resources, therefore we have a couple of people who can develop in BOARD (to provide support).

We have an internal solution. However, we think it is sub-optimal. This is why we work with the BOARD. We have other partners with some similar cookies, but not exactly.

We switched to BOARD because we felt the need to have flexibility, and BOARD had the performance that others did not. 

Implementation is rather complex.

BOARD has a lot of flexibility, but it is sort of a development tool. It is not an out-of-the-box kit where you can just feed it in. It needs to be constructed, and it needs an expert to learn it.

We have been very happy with what we have seen. We are pretty new to this. We have done three implementations so far. BOARD has been performing well and is very efficient, though we have to improve the implementation time on our end.

I would personally advise looking into BOARD (depending on your needs).

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

1. Product
2. Relationship with our clients/partners.

If we do not have a sustainable working relationship, then we can't move forward, even if the product is outstanding.

Our primary use case for BOARD is sales analysis, as well as financial planning, analysis, and budgeting. We are also highly leveraging the CPM portion, as well as the BI tools that BOARD provides.

So far, it is performing extremely well. We are very happy with the new updates and new releases. We have had very good support.

The benefits of the solution are a lot of flexibility from a data modeling standpoint. The product can add specific line items into our budget, for example, or if we want to make changes to the data model, we have that flexibility. Therefore, flexibility and scalability are some of the strongest qualities that BOARD has.

The most valuable feature of BOARD is that it is comprised of a full bundle package solution, while being a BI and CPM tool. Meanwhile, some of its competitors are either/or, but not both.

One thing that I personally would like to see is additional visualization tools for visuals. A lot of its competitors are releasing different iterations of their BI visual tools. 

Stability has been perfect. We have never had any issues from downtime.

We are not nervous about our future with BOARD. We are very confident.

We were using a different solution and needed to increase automation, and we needed to stray away from Excel spreadsheets and the combination of different tools and mechanisms.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are 

• Partnership
• Cost
• Scalability
• Implementation.

I am actively involved in the setup. We have set up our sales portion. We are about two weeks out from having a full release for our financials.

It is a complex tool and very sophisticated. We get a lot of use out of it. Thus, we expect complexity with flexibility.

We used consultants to support us with the implementation and to initially set things up properly. They were absolutely supportive and knowledgeable.

We looked at the big players: Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, Vena Solutions, and QlikView. We did not feel any of these solutions were perfect.

I would say the best is yet to come. Based on all the new, upcoming releases, features, and eLearning. If you are looking to make a decision, you should defer from making a decision right now, because the best is yet to come.