Anaplan is a scenario planning and analysis platform designed to optimize decision-making in complex business environments so that enterprises can outpace their competition and the market. By building connections and collaboration across organizational silos, the Anaplan platform surfaces key insights.
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ReconNET by Trintech
Score 10.0 out of 10
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ReconNET is a corporate performance management solution from Trintech. ReconNET automates account reconciliation, including high-volume reconciliation, with the goal of helping users tighten controls, reduce risk and increase process efficiency.
Anaplan is a great tool for complex modeling of the future. When you are planning your actions for the future, have multiple, disparate datasets to interact with, have dozens if not hundreds of stakeholders who must contribute and need to be guided via a streamlined workflow engine, require complex logic that can grow with your org, require real-time reporting, and you need it all in less than 6 months.
It is well suited in scenarios where customers have tremendous volumes of data to deal with and where the reconciliation of the information is of paramount importance to businesses and stakeholders. We use it primarily for balance sheet reconciliations that come with features, such as exception management, which is great for focusing on the few that matter the most at the end of the day.
The ReconNET tool has a great audit-trial system that captures every detail in the life of a record and helps eliminate any manual intervention. It's fully SOX Compliant, and helps track any changes in the data from an audit perspective.
The automation helps us focus entirely on the exceptions, which helps eliminate attention from the mundane tasks to areas with potential problems.
Exception management and automated posting to the GL are great features that help streamline many of the routine, mundane, and yet time-consuming activities, freeing up time to focus on issues at hand.
Ability to decide if to apply the formula or a manual input on front end for each line item
Real Time Data Transfer across models. Currently Data is transferred using Processes across different models. Having a functionality to access data from any model in real time would be great
It takes a little bit of practice to get the hang of the tool to set up the reconciliations, but its not necessarily a drawback, since this applies to every other automation tool out there. However, once someone gets the hang of it, it's pretty user-friendly to run it on a daily basis.
Since automatons can only be built on a set logic, at times certain items that show up as exceptions are not truly a cause of concern. However, since it's always better to flag too many potential exceptions than too few, it's not a true drawback.
It has quite a few features, such as multi-currency reconciliation, bank deposits, disbursements, automated postings to G/L, etc. which could be of great value for various requirements for clients. It is especially useful where volumes of data are too large to deal with. The uses might not be phenomenal for low volume reconciliation requirements.
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
Anaplan's usability is very good. Users can customize reports and make adjustments with very little training. They can quickly plan and collaborate very easily. Making large adjustments or creating complex functionality may require more experience or training but a lot of tasks can be completed by users with very little experience
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.
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.
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
The platform allows a flexible implementation mechanic to be put in place, since the possibilities and functionalities are vast and there are very few things the tool cannot do well. The solutions for the financial planning and the integrated business planning we put in place were easily adopted by the end users and their day-to-day work was made easier.
Compared to OneStream and Venna Anaplan offers a more modern look and feel of the platform. It is better situated and maintained in regards of platform updates as it's a full SaaS software there are never any issues with the system version as it's always automatically up to date with no backward compatibility issues. Due to the flexible nature of the modelling engine, it is also better suited to perform larger multi-department use cases, like IBP (Integrated Business Planning)
Each automation tool has its own set of features, but the fact that ReconNET is built for reconciliation purposes sets it apart from the rest. The ease of usage once the user gets a hang of it, the extensive audit trial, and the ability to focus on exceptions rather than the necessity to scroll through a bulk of irrelevant information, all provide the key-user with the critical decision-making ability.
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
We've typically seen an average of 40% removal of time from processes using Anaplan an enabler
Though difficult to quantify, we consistently find our processes less error prone than in the past. Essentially, we've removed a previously "hidden cost" of risk due to poor data quality that was buried in our processes.
It definitely has a positive impact on ROI with freeing up resource availability and usage on the most pressing tasks at hand. For example, focusing on exceptions rather than reconciling from scratch.
Another positive impact on the ROI can be realized with the detailed audit trials on sensitive information.
Strong Financial Reporting is the backbone of any industry, regardless of the sector it operates in, and having an automated reconciliation tool such as ReconNET helps you attain the key objective of integrity of information in a timely fashion, to support the close process.
