We’d love to hear about your experience with Phocas. Whether you’re using Analytics, Financial Statements, Budgets & Forecasts, Rebates or CRM, the product design team is very keen for a quick chat with you.
how do you use the product?
what pain points are you experiencing?
do you have any improvement suggestions?
Reply to this thread and we’ll reach out. Thank you!
Hi Team,
Really love the product. However, a couple of suggestions:
Home page navigation would be easier if it was a folder structure that you navigate through, rather than filtering column headers.
Home page, if not going to develop a folder structure, then being able to save column views rather than it resetting each time you go back to the home page
Dashboard formatting: would be nice if there was more formatting available for dashboards, eg: background colours, to make more contrast and more distinction between dashboard lines.
Industry modes: I know this is in beta testing, however will this be available to share/save to dashboards? The data generated from this is great and we’d love it on dashboards.
Industry modes: Ability to select multiple (random) lines to focus on. Multi select works, but only for lines in sequence.
Thanks for the feedback @tom.christodoulou - much appreciated! Any chance of a quick chat? Thanks, Tim.
To address points 1 and 2, you’ll be pleased to hear that we are currently working on making home page column filters persist, so it won’t reset each time you go back. (currently no plans for a folder structure, though).
Our medium term road map also includes a dashboard overhaul. It is still early stages, but the current plan does provide considerably more distinction between dashboard lines (early designs do not allow for changing background colours but we will definitely consider your suggestion)
Yes, you absolutely will be able to save industry modes on a dashboard, and as a favourite. This is on the short term road map.
The selection of lines in Industry modes will match the way it works in Analytics. It is also on the road map.
We also really love the Analytics product and Phocas. One of, if not the best software vendors we do business with.
Here are a few things we run into that force us to download and format some reports:
Ability to move and re-sort properties
More enhancement in conditional formatting (gradients)
Ability to sort by multiple columns
“True Viewer Mode License” - We run into situations where we want to share a dashboard that can filter by user but they only need to view this one dashboard and have no ability to do anything other than have the dashboard filtered to a store for example. We don’t really want to create multiple versions of the dashboard and the cost for a viewer license to access one dashboard doesn’t make sense. Or a method to share the external link to a set of “users” who we can control who has access.
Do you have plans to enhance the heat map functionality or look into any geospatial analysis to combine sales with customer addresses/drive times? We currently use Phocas + another product for this.
Any plans to pull in 3rd party data services like weather, traffic etc?
We’d also love to use the CRM but it’s lacking a lot of features we use today with our CRM. We’re currently using Phocas for the sales data then the sales team goes into another product to record the sales visits/follow up etc. I’d be happy to explain/document those items separately.
Good news - a feature has been designed and developed that allows you to re-sort and re-name properties. Release is expected in September.
Unfortunately changes to conditional formatting aren’t on any short or medium term roadmaps at this stage.
Multi-column sort is on the short-medium term roadmap. Stay tuned.
I do understand the issue - it has been raised previously. We haven’t got a solution - but your idea of sharing/exporting/external linking an already filtered dashboard does seem realistic.
No immediate plans for heat maps but I would be keen to chat further about this request.
We are experimenting with third party data like exchange rates (for multi-currency databases), but very early stages.
Our CRM product is deliberately very simple, which means it doesn’t have the depth of functionality you might see in Hubspot or Salesforce.
Would be great to chat further about these. I’ll reach out separately. Cheers!
Thank you for providing feedback! My name is Emma, I’m a Product Designer at Phocas and I work with Tim. I’d be keen to arrange a meeting to discuss your feedback further.
Tim - I had a similar thing come up today to @jmills regarding sharing dashboards. We have some dashboards that we want to share with users, and we don’t even need to be able filter permissions for specific users. We don’t want to use external links because they’re not secure, but we also don’t feel the dashboards we’d like to share warrant the cost of viewer licenses. So, a couple things:
Can there be an even more simplified viewer license that costs a lot less? Literally “I want to be able to assign dashboards and favorites to a user, but I don’t care about restrictions, permissions etc.”
Can external links be set up to be behind a password? So an external link can be created and used, but a user still has to enter a password to access it. I could see this being either an organization-wide password for external links, or unique passwords for each external link created.
Where did the customer profitability Industry Mode go? I was excited to see that being built!
I second a lot of the other suggestions made by others, especially dashboard formatting and multi-column sorting. I’ll think about if I have any other suggestions or feedback
It would be great to get some documentation on the SQL Formulas we can use in custom mode as described here, here and here
Also, it was mentioned over a year ago that you were working on providing the ability to choose which columns show in places such as Period Variance mode and that we would see the functionality soon. Are there any updates on this? There are definitely issues with showing too many columns in some views and needing to resort to custom views to reduce it down to a more manageable level is tedious so this would be great.
