Budgyt is a platform made to simplify business budgeting. With built-in functions designed for data integrity, team collaboration, and scenario planning & analysis, Budgyt is presented as an optimized budgeting experience that rids users of complex, error-prone spreadsheets and the time-consuming upkeep they require. It provides users navigable dashboards, drill-downs through data hyperlinking, formulas built away from the user interface, and automatic consolidation. With…
$499
per month Departments
Planful
Score 8.1 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Planful is a cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM) suite. It includes financial applications for modeling, planning, consolidation, reporting and analytics.
Planful was another software we looked at that seemed to have a lot more bells and whistles. Integrations into PowerPoint and Excel that were probably too much for what we needed. In the end, Budgyt was very easy to learn and understand. It provided immediate value.
I'm sure that Budgyt would not be the most appropriate solution for large, complex organizations with numerous entities or overly complicated structures. Those org's likely have solutions within their ERPs or other sophisticated finance systems with budgeting/reporting capabilities that mirror Budgyt, making it redundant. However, for an easy, and relatively cheap solution to meeting those needs, as well as forecasting and analysis, I would recommend Budgyt to anyone with the need.
Planful makes it very easy to roll forward forecasts and conduct scenario analyses. I'm also a big fan of their reporting and how easy it is to distribute a report burst to satisfy all the needs and questions of our SLT. Lastly, their latest developments in the AI space make it easy to quickly identify outlier projections.
Combining departments (components of an entity or a component of various entity's income statement) or isolating departments (small slivers) of an entity's income statement. We can look at specific departments of specific entities together, with ease.
Splicing / flipping reports into countless formats. Helpful for users of the financial statements that digest data/numbers differently than the financial accountants who prepare the numbers.
It is relatively easy to import data from our Jonas accounting program into Budgyt.
We've had prompt customer service when we've encountered issues and they were readily available during implementation.
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! 😅
Multiple currency calculations/ consolidations support IFRS accounting
Ability to inactivate old data dimensions
Reporting - Need ability to expand all/collapse all lines easily
Reporting - Formula exceptions added to a report do not update when information is revised.
Automatic Sandbox refreshes initiated by Planful - When Planful does an automatic refresh of the sandbox environment, it copies any Boomi/integration connections.
Limited to 8 data dimensions in core application
Add more API connectors to make data integration easier
ability to transfer sandbox tests to production environment
Our organization has increased our level of financial reporting and decreased the time it takes to build a budget with the Budgyt platform. Because our budget managers have access, it allows them a higher level of ownership for their areas.
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.
Has the spreadsheet feel without the clunky formulas. Prior years monthly numbers easily visible on the data sheet to compare with. Easily run various reports on the dashboard. Easy to clone/create new scenarios. Custom template to import GL detail the way want to see it. User friendly for non-finance managers to use. Options to add comments on data sheet. Approval process - easy of viewing what needs to be approved.
Planful is very easy to use for end users. The budget templates can be customized to meet the business needs. They just released business user experience functionality which you to take a complicated budget template and filter it down to meet departmental needs to avoid sending more lines than needed
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
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
We got little training on the tool after implementation. Did a lot of "trial by fire" learning about Planful. I don't think RSM really provided us all the details we needed to understand the tool and to know what we needed to train on. I don't know we knew enough about the tool to even ask the right questions and then they left and we used Planful support a lot.
A few years ago I participated in a lot of their online learning. Their references have grown over the years and continue to get better and better. We use it throughout the year to update the information we hold internally for documentation and to educate ourselves on all of the new release notes and features within Planful.
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.
Forecaster was terrible. We switched from that. We looked at multiple products, either too expensive or not user-friendly. We switched 4 years ago. I do not recall the companies we visited back then. There are certainly more on the market now, but I have no interest in switching as our entire office loves the product.
Planful seems to do a better job of pulling things in a format that is more understandable to an accounting-minded person, whereas the other platforms seem more focused on operations. From a detail perspective, Planful provides more powerful and complete data, in my experience. When using a platform for financial planning and budgeting, the details are critical and the ability to match the GL structure and pull full P&L data has been a big improvement from Qlik, which we used previously.
Budget scenarios are amazing, when it comes to educational funding, were always having to pivot. Having multiple scenarios for financial planning is key to being economically sustainable. We can quickly add services or staffing based upon funding adjustments/projections and see if they will work in our current climate. This supports leaderships ability to make quicker decisions.
I give this rating simply because I have first-hand knowledge of the scalability of Planful when working across departments in our company that use different financial systems. We have one team on InEight and another using SAP. When we implemented it, we only customized the system to accommodate one of these financial platforms, but when we considered expanding the use of Planful to other departments, we were able to make the necessary adjustments to accommodate our needs.
We have saved a large amount of time on reports that we previously manually compiled in Excel via MS Dynamics. Planful was linked to Dynamics through automatically scheduled DLR's, reports were created, and now our manual processes are as simple as accessing and refreshing a report.
Dashboards have improved our budgeting process specifically with our production leaders as they can visualize their P&L's, their current actuals, current budget, and see where they are forecasting with their proposed budget for the next year
With the use of templates, structured planning, and the Simulation Engine, it has added a lot of value and automation to our annual budget process, allowing for plug-and-play type data loading and viewing various scenarios easily
