NaviPlan by Advicent vs. Dynamo Software

NaviPlan is an invaluable financial planning tool. There are so many strategies and reports that can be built and used within the software. I've been using it for around 8 years and still don't how to use all of the functions. It has come a long way over the 8 years in terms of functionality. There is a definite learning curve, however, I've found it has become more user friendly.

Incentivized

Customer Service, Project Managers and our personal contact have been exceptional. Since the software is able to do so much and there are so many options the Dynamo team has been invaluable to us. Our company would not have been able to double in size over the last 4 years if it wasn't for Dynamo Software.

• Employee benefits management, planning, and calculation become simpler with the Navi plan.
• Budget planning, risk management, and other account management become easy and simpler to analyze by the top management.
• Tax calculation and other payments become easy for the organization as well as individual employees.
• Cashflow analysis and modifications in the allocation become easy and could be understood by all the top-level management in a single window.

Incentivized

• Tracking relationships in the CRM and the Web Add-in tool to add new information straight from emails.
• The flexibility to build out whatever view you would like to see certain data in and the ability to then export information to Excel.
• The Mail Merge Tool allows us to communicate to over 100 different subsets of our limited partners in different SPVs.

• Much favorable for small industries, so better to make it good for large enterprise also.
• Illustration can be made easy so that quick understanding can be done.
• Tracking of the particular item is a bit difficult, this could be made easier.
• Not much user friendly compared to the competitors. But does the job well.

Incentivized

• Some functionality is clunky: Mailing Campaigns, Passthrough Integration, Dynamo Accounting Complex Transactions. At times it seems functionality is rolled out too soon.
• Onboarding of new clients for us seems a bit haphazard. We just added a new tenant with CRM, Dynamo Accounting and the Investor Portal and we weren't exactly sure what the state of the new tenant should be based on what was copied over from a prior tenant or how much Dynamo Software time or support we would have to customize the new tenant.
• At times it seems Dynamo Software's terminology with relationships either isn't intuitive or is repetitive creating additional time/confusion when modifying workspaces, portal set-up, etc.

I give it this rating because I think it could be easier to use. While there are sooo many different ways to use the software, it can be very intimidating and confusing, even when you feel confident in what you know how to do. I feel like everytime I want to add something new or do something out of our norm I have to ask for help

Snap Projections - We were using this software up until this year alongside Naviplan to see how it compared. The reason we tried Snap Projections was the difference in pricing. Naviplan is expensive, where Snap is only a fraction of the cost. The biggest reason we stayed with Naviplan was familiarity for the advisor presenting. He was accustomed to it. I find the interface of Naviplan better cosmetically. They both are great financial planning software tools with pros and cons in each. I have found that you can manipulate the software to show most of what you need. Both platforms continually update and take user feedback into consideration when building on to it so they both get better all the time

Incentivized

Dynamo Software makes the most sense from a cost perspective for available offerings to our clients. The integration between the CRM, Accounting module and investor portal. We also appreciate the ability to customize the investor portal to the client's request all within the same license.

• Tax calculation of the organization and employees was very difficult, and Navi Plan made is very easy now.
• The introduction of the software makes positive changes in the organization in managing the financial needs, which helps the organization to allocate what is required.
• Employee benefit calculation was a bit difficult and it made a big positive impact.
• It does the job and we get the best for what we pay for.
• If the industry becomes big, then slight changes must be introduced to manage the big data needs.

Incentivized

• creating work flows for new clients
• can cause issues with to many items in the pipeline
• Allows us to view funding quickly and efficiently