Hello,
We started using Epicor and XL Connect in 2021 and were disappointed to learn XL Connect will no longer be supported in Kinetic starting next year—especially since it was sold to us as a long-term solution. While XL Connect hasn’t been perfect, it has worked for creating financial statements.
Has anyone transitioned to FP&A? If so, could you share your experience—particularly how many support hours you needed versus what you handled internally? Do you like the functionality? We hadn’t budgeted for $16K+ in support/training, so any advice would be greatly appreciated.
We haven’t looked at FP&A but I would avoid buying any of Epicor’s “partner” products at this point since they have proven they won’t hesitate to toss it out with no warning. I would rather buy something where I control the vendor relationship than be at their mercy to have to switch again whenever the mood strikes them.
XL Connect is a product by BizInsight. They have a similar product called Spreadsheet Server that is nicer and faster than the XL Connect product. We moved to it shortly before Epicor and BizInsight had a falling out due to Epicor promoting their own product. You can migrate / buy direct from them if you don’t want to go the FP&A route. We didn’t want to redesign all of our reports in another product again.
As you mentioned, XL Connect (XLC) support is ending by the end of the year. There’s another product called Spreadsheet Server that’s kind of like an upgraded version of XLC. Both were made by the same developer, but they ended their partnership with Epicor after some disagreements.
Switching over to FP&A can be a bit tricky—or pretty smooth—depending on how many reports you have and how complex they are. We’ve helped a few customers make the move already. Some transitions were super easy, while others took more time because of the way the reports were set up.
That said, I’d suggest going for FP&A since it’s an Epicor product. That way, you won’t have to deal with third-party support issues. Just make sure you’ve got the right team helping with the implementation—whether it’s Epicor or a partner who really understands what you need and what you’re trying to do.
We looked at all of these a few years ago when they said AFR was ending (back when FP&A had a viable on-prem option). We took a little long to decide and FP&A became more of a web product and had a better overall set of options - including the Excel add-in. We saw that as the best of both worlds, as we were leaning to XLConnect because of Excel. Our implementation is going smoothly and our guy turned 3 of our reports around in a single day. the biggest effort was re-organizing our GL Chart (updating some names, moving some categories around and altering the hierarchy) so that the reports and filtering would be much simpler.
In the long run, we’ll do budgeting and some forecasting as well. but we’re liking it so far.
Thanks for the feedback so far. For those who’ve implemented FP&A, could you share an estimate of billed hours for the conversion? We were quoted up to 70 hours—including training—which feels excessive for a small company with just three XL Connect users.
Our reporting is fairly basic: Balance Sheet, Cash Flow, and Income Statement (summary and detail), all built internally in XL Connect. We’d likely do the same in FP&A, though ideally, migration support would be included at no extra cost—especially since we didn’t anticipate needing to switch so soon.
That’s almost our exact scenario. Our quote is “billed as used”, and we’ve only used about 10 hours so far, but haven’t completed all the training. Our guy turned those three reports around in a day, but we did a week’s worth of work internally to get the GL Chart ‘fixed’ to work with FP&A (nothing major at all, just took us some time to review, DMT, review, DMT, etc..)
For those on Spreadsheet Server, were you required to purchase the Read Only Database from Epicor in order to integrate? Can you share the cost of this? Thank you. @Moreno.Mauricio@edozier
hey @lfilzen
as far as I remember the new SS integration allows you to select between two different installations:
On-prem
Cloud
Both are “integrated” in the installer meaning you can select the “Standard” for On-Prem or the Cloud version meaning you don’t need to purchase the Read Only DB.
The SS installation shouldn’t take more than 2-6 hours depending on your environment; the reports migrations is a different story as there’s no straight pad or tool conversion to do so, you will need to update manually and could take between 2-8 hours each report, depending on the complexity of them.
