Axiom Software by Syntellis Performance Solutions vs. Planning Maestro

Axiom is extremely well suited to optimize the Budget process. Using Axiom, we have cut our overall budget cycle time in half and have a much higher level of accuracy in all facets of the Budget including Fee Income, Expense, and Margin. Axiom is also well suited for advanced data users as you have the ability to create your own custom database tables which allows you to join to the existing Axiom tables and has allowed us to create custom reporting that we could not even think about on our previous system. The other big benefit of Axiom is that it sits on top of Microsoft Excel and inherits all of its functionality, which most people have experience with.

Incentivized

I've been a user for many years, moving from company to company, client to client, and this software has been my "go-to". The team at Centage has never let me down, whether in implementation, or general needs. I've been able to depend on them to continue to develop the product and listen when there have been items that need to be addressed. Companies that take a good hard look at this software will not be disappointed with its capabilities and what it can do for their organization.

• Compared to a previous EPM we used, Axiom's template load and saving performance has been much better even for large plan files.
• Axiom consultants can create completely customized reports for any of the collected data. Super users within your organization can then fairly easily modify their work to create additional reports without Axiom's help (and invoices)
• Setting up user security is a fairly easy one-time task and very easy to maintain when people change departments, leave the organization, etc. I would recommend you use role-based security settings.
• Compared to our previous EPM, Axiom allows more customization and possibilities for templates. There's very few "the product can't do that" statements.

Incentivized

• Detailed budgeting even for shared chart of accounts with names and descriptions
• Multiple budget versions, easy to copy versions
• Easy navigation
• Several layers of security rules
• Uploading of budgets using excel based templates
• Several options for filtering
• Personnel or salary budgeting
• Monthly budgeting

• Implementation is quite Complex and requires both IT and Financial buy-in
• Reporting solution has some learning curve for end users
• Calculation methods within reporting can be opaque and hard to trace

Incentivized

• Took some time to roll out the cloud-based solution.
• The older version (not cloud-based) we used took about an hour to refresh after data load.
• The older version did take some time learning how to use the product to its fullest capabilities.

Incentivized

We are happy with Planning Maestro, not just with the product but also with the customer service.

For the scale of our implementation, Axiom only assigned two consultants who were both completely new to the company. It felt like we were all learning about the product together, when you would expect them to already be experts at their own product. The team also made a good bit of mistakes throughout production and go-live, which then caused more work internally for us. The team lead for our project also just left the company, so we'll see how next year's planning goes

Incentivized

The team at Centage is great to work with. If I have a concern or issue they have been ready and willing to help.

Axiom was selected based on the impression of ease of use and integration. It is capable of holding all of our entities data while giving us an easier more accessible way to deliver monthly Financials and reports to managers. Then in costing we signed up because the impression of budgeting.

Incentivized

Planning Maestro stacks up well with other budgeting systems we evaluated about 10 years ago. Reasonable cost for what we need and we are grateful for timely and responsive support system.

• Forecasting has improved
• Complexity of analysis has improved as well
• Our main data has been confused as we started using Axiom

• We were a very small company growing by acquisition so it worked well during these phases of our company growth.
• The return for our cost was tremendous especially in comparison to peers in the market.
• Analytics Maestro allowed us to grow without adding headcount by building efficient reports that can easily be mass-produced for all branches within our organization.

Incentivized