Community Exchange

We're a small private liberal arts institution using Ellucian Colleague as our ERP, and we currently use Prophix as our budgeting software.  Are there any other institutions out there on the Prophix platform?  We're looking at making a switch over to Synoptix and are evaluating both the Pro's and Con's of both Prophix and Synoptix.

------------------------------
Joe McCracken
Director of Financial Planning and Analysis
Doane University
------------------------------

Hello Joe,  We are a small private non-profit health sciences university.   We tried Prophix for budgeting, and found the product cumbersome, and were unable to ultimately to get it to work at all for us.  We do not have a large inhouse tech team that could do the build out, and their in-house team did not seem to understand our business or build to our specifications.  We stopped using it mid-contract and did not renew.   Since we are so small, we went back to our previous process that leverages MSForms, Excel, and SharePoint.   I am not familiar with Synoptix, and would be interested to hear if they are more capable of handling a small institution.   

------------------------------
Louise Borda
Senior Associate Dean of Educational Operations
California University of Science and Medicine
------------------------------

Louise,  Thank you for the response.  It's good to at least hear how it went for you, even though it wasn't the desired result.  Appreciate the insight.

------------------------------
Joe McCracken
Director of Financial Planning and Analysis
Doane University
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 12-10-2025 11:47 AM
From: Louise Borda
Subject: Financial Reporting & Budgeting Software

Hello Joe,  We are a small private non-profit health sciences university.   We tried Prophix for budgeting, and found the product cumbersome, and were unable to ultimately to get it to work at all for us.  We do not have a large inhouse tech team that could do the build out, and their in-house team did not seem to understand our business or build to our specifications.  We stopped using it mid-contract and did not renew.   Since we are so small, we went back to our previous process that leverages MSForms, Excel, and SharePoint.   I am not familiar with Synoptix, and would be interested to hear if they are more capable of handling a small institution.   

------------------------------
Louise Borda
Senior Associate Dean of Educational Operations
California University of Science and Medicine
------------------------------

Hello Joe. We are also a small private non-profit school. We have been on Prophix for over 10 years (the on-prem version which many people did not like because it was very slow) but have since migrated to the cloud version Spring 2024 (and budget owners are much happier). We are in the process now of converting over to Workday/Adaptive to have a single ERP for most of the campus. From what I have seen so far of Adaptive I am way more impressed with Prophix in regards to the budgeting workflows, the visuals you can create/customizing reports, and just the ease of the excel like functions. I am not going to dismiss Adaptive just yet, because it eliminates the need for integrations, etc; but I have a feeling I will miss Prophix. I, unfortunately, do not know anything about Synoptix to offer any feedback on that. I hope this helps. 

------------------------------
Heather Cooper
Director of Financial Planning & Analysis
Dunwoody College of Technology
------------------------------

Heather,  Thank you for the response.  We are on the Cloud version of Prophix as well.  Thank you for sharing your thoughts and I do have similar feelings when comparing the workflows and visuals from one system to the other.  But as we all know to well, everything does come at a price point.  Once again, thank you for the insights. 

------------------------------
Joe McCracken
Director of Financial Planning and Analysis
Doane University
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 12-17-2025 08:54 AM
From: Heather Cooper
Subject: Financial Reporting & Budgeting Software

Hello Joe. We are also a small private non-profit school. We have been on Prophix for over 10 years (the on-prem version which many people did not like because it was very slow) but have since migrated to the cloud version Spring 2024 (and budget owners are much happier). We are in the process now of converting over to Workday/Adaptive to have a single ERP for most of the campus. From what I have seen so far of Adaptive I am way more impressed with Prophix in regards to the budgeting workflows, the visuals you can create/customizing reports, and just the ease of the excel like functions. I am not going to dismiss Adaptive just yet, because it eliminates the need for integrations, etc; but I have a feeling I will miss Prophix. I, unfortunately, do not know anything about Synoptix to offer any feedback on that. I hope this helps. 

------------------------------
Heather Cooper
Director of Financial Planning & Analysis
Dunwoody College of Technology
------------------------------

Joe,

We used both systems at Central College in an Ellucian on prem environment. Synoptix is a good reporting tool, very flexible but to me it is not a budgeting tool. Prophix on the other hand is a budgeting and reporting tool but is highly complex/powerful. We discontinued using Prophix after the third year since they would not restructure our contract to what we needed, and that you will need to budget system buildout for at least seven years before it is to the level of their demo...we just couldn't afford it.

------------------------------
Karen Tumlinson
Vice President for Finance & Operations and CFO
Hendrix College
------------------------------

Hi Joe, I am curious. I understand Ellucian has its own integrated budgeting module. If that is the case, why are you using tools outside the system?

------------------------------
Clara Short
Director of Financial Planning and Analysis
Husson University
------------------------------