Anaplan vs. Xactly Commission Expense Accounting

Anaplan is great for enterprise clients that want to pursue a path of connected planning. If designed correctly, a data hub can be your central data repository which acts a shared dataset across your organization. From Marketing and Sales, to HR and Finance - Anaplan will be the one source of truth as individuals contribute to the business process.

CEA is well suited for small and rapidly growing companies where manually calculating commissions expense for ASC606 is not an option due to a lack of internal resources. CEA is less appropriate for larger companies that have the resources and likely a person, or people, who only focus on commissions.

Incentivized

• Anaplan has a very fast calculation engine which is able to model across multiple dimensions in real time across huge data sets. This helps in calculating complex scenarios instantaneously
• Easy to maintain by business teams which reduces dependency on IT teams within the organization and also on external consultants
• Advanced Tenant controls which allows administrators to manage security and access across various models

• Amortization waterfalls
• Locked periods & PPA adjustments
• Journal entries

Incentivized

• I would like there to be additional visualization improvements/features for reports
• Additional technical support resources would be great to quickly resolve bugs
• I would like for improvements around the ability to have a lot of dimensions in a table of data and the speed around processing those calcs.

• Dashboard is on a different page
• Needing to rerun reports
• Not being able to download reports and edit them

Incentivized

In any line of work, a tool that is flexible and would allow different departments of your company to easily interact and exchange valuable insights, is highly anticipated and needed. For me, what Anaplan provides to a business, be it a smaller one or an enterprise customer, is an easily scaling, agile planning and modeling platform that can meet almost any need and give a high-end solution to the problems any company faces on a daily basis.

Anaplan is very usable from a user perspective. Anaplan's level 1 and level 2 training courses are great resources and I highly recommend any power users of the platform consider completing both. These courses showcase, and therefore unlock an understanding of the platform which allows for quick and easy, agile, and iterative front end design

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.

the training is great. I achieved master Anaplanner and on a consulting career path all through Anaplan forum. The training is very easy to follow and there are a lot of people who will help you on the forrum if you are stucked real simulation without the need to go to anaplan for some training

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

Agile methodology and breaking the work down into sprints was very helpful. Implementation required a deeper dive into our data than expected for the consultants to be able to construct the data model. But once it was in place, the focus on knowledge transfer enabled us to be able to use the product effectively after the team rolled off.

Incentivized

Go into implementation knowing how you will handle churn, if there are claw backs, treatment for every type of commission payment (i.e. new business, renewals, etc.) and know your average customer life. You'll also want details by customer for as far back as you can go (within reason).

Incentivized

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)

We selected Xactly CEA for ASC 606.

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

• Creating forecasts takes at least 1 week less time due to FPA not needing to track down and consolidate forecasts from the entire business. The department heads can log in and enter it themselves
• Peace of mind knowing that every change ever made can be traced down to the individual cell level
• No risk of spreadsheets with data not meant to be shared to everyone being sent out. Security provisioning is flexible and works 100% of the time

• Efficiency
• Centralized
• Accurate

Incentivized