This market covers core financial management suites that provide a view of an enterprise's financial position through automation and process support for any activity that has a financial impact. According to Gartner's definition, core financial management suites include: • The functional areas of general ledger (GL), accounts payable (AP), accounts receivable (AR), fixed assets (FA), project accounting, project costing and project billing. • Financial analytics and reporting capabilities • Basic indirect purchasing functionality. This market focuses solely on core financial management suites that are marketed and sold on a stand-alone basis and delivered as cloud services. It does not cover vendors that sell only a broader ERP suite that includes core financial management applications.
Financial planning and analysis (FP&A) solutions support the office of finance's budgeting, planning and forecasting efforts. Many also supplement the office's budgeting and planning process support with modeling, collaboration analytics and performance-reporting capabilities, to increase its ability to manage performance by linking corporate strategy and execution. The FP&A market is accelerating its shift from mature on-premises offerings to cloud solutions. New solutions built or significantly rearchitected as cloud services are typically easier to use and maintain than the previous generation of on-premises offerings. The vast majority of new FP&A sales are cloud-based. On-premises options still exist, but all vendors have greatly de-emphasized them or eliminated them entirely from their sales process. All the vendors in this market sell and support cloud-based FP&A solutions.
Gartner defines a service-centric ERP suite as comprising: Financials, HCM and indirect procurement (administrative ERP) PSA — includes project planning and resourcing, project management, and project accounting and billing Specialized industry-specific modules or applications — for example, grant management in higher education and public sectors A service-centric ERP suite must provide at least financial management functionality from administrative ERP and either PSA or industry-specific modules for at least one service-centric industry. Optionally, the vendor may provide other administrative ERP capabilities (such as HCM and indirect procurement).