Budgyt vs. Calumo vs. Planful

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

I think it is a useful tool from a reporting standpoint. It does a good job of data aggregation from different sources, even if slow at times. I think the tools for building forecasting and budgeting templates are straight forward but allow for a level of complexity that make it both easy to use but also allow for complex builds so that our models can take into account many different variables that drive our daily performance.

Incentivized

• 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

• Creating forecasts for the month, quarter, and year
• Creating new variables by using variables pre-defined and that are new in the system
• Having a very simple setup in the reports section - not straying away from the old Excel model which most people are used to. I can speak for a lot of people when I say that tools that look new can easily be frightening! 😅

Incentivized

• 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

• Dashboarding could be more flexible and easier to use.
• Dynamic Reporting has room for flexibility with nesting, dimension names showing up instead of “All,” and overall flexibility.
• Make Analyze view in Spotlight more intuitive.
• A high-level onboarding guide to understanding the different components of Planful, data flows, and tips & tricks.

Incentivized

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

Our new Comptroller understands the value of Planful, and we plan to utilize it further in the organization to enhance external reporting. Strangely enough, Planful had not previously been embraced by the former CFO, who argued that we were running two sets of books (of course, we were not). Fortunately, the before mentioned reconciliation of EBITDA to Net Income demonstrated that to the banks.

Incentivized

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

The tool is extremely adaptable, and it enables very quick querying to give us opportunity to gain live insights into the business. Given its adaptability, we are also able to create scenario analyses very quickly in rapidly changing environments. The formatting also enables us to provide this information in a very consumable manner.

Incentivized

I only give a 9 rating rather than a 10 rating because it seems that every day around 2pm we see a slowdown in the use of Planful. I have requested our internal IT department verify that it is not an internal issue and have been assured it is the tool. We have not yet reached out to Planful to do extensive research to solve this issue.

Again, the system is very reliable and, for the most part, runs very quick and smooth. When running larger queries, it does take some time, and during budgeting season our users experienced slower loading times, but nothing that raises concerns outside of normal network issues. Occasionally, as with any software we use, it will crash and you have to restart, but that does not happen very often.

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

Sometimes we get great help when using Planful's support team and other times we don't. In particular, there is one person that often responds to our support tickets who is less than helpful, hence the reason for the 5 out of 10 rating. As a result, most of the time we reach out to our Planful consulting group as they provide faster and better support

My team has attended training offered several times before/during the Planful Perform conference. This training has been extremely useful and we always learn something we didn't know prior to the training. The trainers are always very knowledgeable and more than willing to help each and every user after the training with specific questions regarding their environment.

Incentivized

This training is much more robust now than it was when we first implemented our Planful environment. Many times we can do a little research in the "help" portal and do not even need to reach out to support. They are continuously improving the training and information available to users.

Incentivized

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

After going through the initial implementation with Host Analytics and a re-implementation with Cervello (due to an ERP change, not due to a poor initial implementation), I've learned that you really must rely on your internal staff to bear most of the implementation burden. Use the vendor or partners for ideas and best-practice suggestions, and some of the easy-but-time-consuming work. Since you will ultimately be using and maintaining the application, you should be able to do most of it yourself.

Incentivized

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

Prior to joining the company, we tried to implement Vena but were unsuccessful. There we're a few reasons it didn't work out, but a lot of it related to the implementation team they provided. In just the first week with Planful, we achieved more progress than we did in several months with Vena.

Incentivized

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

From our experience, Planful is only used in 2 overhead departments in our organization. We easily added another overhead department, but they decided against using Planful for their workforce and financial planning. Removing them from our environment was extremely easy.

Incentivized

• 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

• Has allowed users to view a real-time P&L in a way they weren't able to do with Qlik.
• Budget to Actual analysis has become much more streamlined and actionable
• Long-range plan process has been significantly streamlined and a lot of time has been cut out of the process.

Incentivized