Anaplan vs. Budgyt

I've implemented a number of projects for Anaplan for Sales Performance Management use cases. It is obviously built for financial planning, but it allows for a lot of flexibility for territory and quota, ICM, sales forecasting, and other important use cases. Territory and Quota is very powerful in the tool as it organize complex assignment structures into hierarchies for easier analysis and reporting.

Budgyt is great for instant consolidation of a multi-department and multi-entity organization. It has strong hierarchy and roll-ups at various levels. User setup and security is straightforward, with ability to restrict data to only department heads over a project. Excellent capability in salary and benefit calculation, for instance down to each type of state and federal tax, and each type of employee health benefit with individual cost as specific as necessary. Strong export functionality.

Incentivized

• Anaplan removes the time consuming process of integrating the results of individual spreadsheets.
• Anaplan facilitates the standardization of assumptions across all sub-processes
• Anaplan provides full transparency of the calculations and source inputs
• Anaplan allows us to automate certain planning processes that would have been impossible when relying on the computational capabilities of an individual computer.

• budgeting: building annual budgets from the ground-up
• financial reporting: Budgyt includes a number of great options for navigating financial reports
• analysis (& reporting): the ease and flexibility of configuring and using data tools allow for detailed analysis, and numerous options for accessing data to enable effective analysis and reporting views

Incentivized

• Some end users don't spend the required amount of time to familiar themselves with Anaplan.
• Auditability, while good in theory, can be lacking and clunky when needed.
• Model building can become convoluted over time, leading to confusion over the specific use of line items.

• The ability to remove %'s entirely from reports, instead of only partially removing %'s from a report.
• The formulas C2C and FOAs can be confusing to set up. I think more explanative data ---- hovering over question marks alongside cells you must complete as a suggestion --- in this module would be useful. These formulas work great once you trial & error your way into them operating. But we find their initial set-up a time commitment. We don't want to watch how-to videos each time we set them up. The hover/clarifications of what certain cells mean would be very helpful.

Incentivized

Anaplan is a very strong multi-dimensional modeling tool that provides a calculation engine to empower a complex planning process. It is fairly easy to learn for those with experience in similar tools, or excel. It forces structure and auditability that spread sheets do not have, along with extensive security capabilities

It is awesome, will never go back to the spreadsheet. Just paid for our second year. It does everything we need. Slick interface for data entry, easy to use and run reports with a few clicks to get what you want. great data comparison, flexible to be able to see monthly totals from prior year or other scenario when entering in the data sheet

Incentivized

As a user it is a very simple tool, but at the same time with a very mature and powerful calculation engine. It is very easy to switch from excel or traditional tools with added capabilities of multi dimensionality and real time calculation engine to see quick insights needed to create plans and scenarios

We have not encountered any issues with Budgyt’s limitations, given the number of departments and the volume of data we pass to the tool. I have no reason to give it anything less than a 10; the only limitation so far is that we don’t have full API integration yet. Once that is finalized, we will be seamlessly integrated across all of our financial platforms and tools.

Incentivized

There are very few outages. Maintenance is scheduled on two or three Saturdays per month, so as not to affect businesses. When there is an outage, users are kept informed of progress to restore the platform and typically this takes no more than an hour. Anaplan customer support is very responsive if we ever have questions about platform issues

Everything is calculated in memory in the cloud. It's nearly instantaneous updates when you make changes. The only time things get a little slow is when you have a massive model with very intricate calculations...but "slow" for Anaplan is not what I would call "slow" for something like Hyperion. We used to have Hyperion calcs that ran for 60 mins before you could use data. The equivalent would be 60 seconds in Anaplan.

Incentivized

Support quality has dropped since Thoma Bravo has taken over. I think some serious re-focus needs to happen here -- part of the beauty of being in the Anaplan community was how involved you felt in it before. Before I didn't dread sending a support ticket, now I am starting to.

During my first year of working within the budget software, I had to go through some training while trying to meet deadlines for meetings. The team at Budgyt was very accommodating and made sure I was equipped with the knowledge that I needed to be successful

Incentivized

In my opinion, in-person training is always the best if you have the option to do so. This allows real-time interactions with the instructions, whereas the online training I took required me to write-down questions, email them, and wait for responses. This slows down the process, as you can imagine. That said, in-person training is an extra cost and it likely isn't needed for everyone. I would suggest selecting a small number of people to take in-person training and then having them act as mentors to the rest of your team. That way, as the rest of the team takes the online training, they have a resource to help them in real time.

Anaplan training materials are clear, simple, easy to understand and to follow. Visuals are excellent. The vendor is good at updating training materials in a timely manner and encouraging users and administrators to keep coming back to Academy site for refresher courses or new feature courses. I really like their interactive diagrams

One key insight from implementing Anaplan is that success comes from focusing on designing the process, not just building the model. Anaplan is extremely flexible—there are very few planning scenarios it cannot support—but that flexibility means the project needs strong governance, clear ownership of requirements, and a well-defined data model. When those foundations are in place, implementations are fast, iterations are easy, and users can quickly see value.
In our projects, both Financial Planning and Integrated Business Planning models were adopted smoothly because we involved business users early, kept the model design intuitive, and leveraged Anaplan’s Excel-like syntax and user-friendly dashboards. The result was more efficient day-to-day work, reduced manual tasks, and increased collaboration across teams. In short: when you combine Anaplan’s flexibility with a structured implementation approach, adoption and value realization happen quickly.

We were fortunate to have the founder lead us through a video conference to teach our users how to use the system. Totally invaluable!

Incentivized

Anaplan is more powerful than Pigment considering that it is an Enterprise class system and is able to manage bigger data sets. Anaplan allows for advanced scenario modeling and formula capabilities along with custom reporting functionalities. Anaplan has proven its capabilities and stability across various use cases and across bigger enterprises when compared to Pigment which is still in earlier phases of its development

Other than Hyperion, which is in a different league and more suitable for much larger organizations, I would say that Budgyt compares very favorably. We moved from Great Plains to Sage Intacct, and evaluated their planning solution at the time of implementation. We were very underwhelmed by the management reporter tool that we used with GP, and budgeted with Excel prior to moving to Sage. We began looking at several other products alongside Budgyt & Sage's solution, but were so impressed by Budgyt that at its price point it was a no-brainer. We liked Sage's tools plenty, but felt that Budgyt could do more and cost less, so opted to go this route despite the lack of direct integration.

Incentivized

We have managed to leverage Anaplan for financial planning and forecasting across the business. It is now used by almost every department, with more than 50 users (but I know of companies that have hundreds of users) and still the platform is quick and reliable. It is easy to make changes to divisions and departments or add users and apply different user settings - the core part of the model is not affected and end users can continue their work without any disruption

The ability to budget at multiple organizational levels is central to Budgyt's design. These levels can be regions or product lines or departments, which are all easily rolled up to a consolidated organizational view. Reporting back against these levels is also built-in to the system.

Incentivized

• Anaplan's implementation led to a significant reduction in planning cycle errors and bugs, streamlining processes and improving overall accuracy in data inputs
• Standardizing the planning process and enabling cross-functional collaboration through Anaplan enhanced our ability to adapt swiftly to changing business needs, resulting in improved agility in decision-making
• The platform's capabilities, especially in Demand Planning and Supply Chain, positively impacted our ROI by optimizing resource allocation and solving complex business problems efficiently across multiple functions

• We have had the product in place for less than a year and have yet to roll it out to the full management team. I know that this will be a huge tool for managers as they are always telling me that they are approving expenses even though they do not know their budget!

Incentivized