Forecastr vs. OnPlan vs. Workday Adaptive Planning

Forecastr is great for any company who is looking to have clarity like never before on their finances, but it may be especially helpful for startups.

Incentivized

OnPlan is well suited for finance teams looking to maintain control of their corporate/financial models. Every model can be exported to Excel. In particular, for early-stage to mid-stage companies, OnPlan provides a powerful and inexpensive solution that allows for automation and customization. Another strong argument for OnPlan is their experienced CSM/IM team that helps to build the first model and acts as a sounding board with insights to improve the models. OnPlan might be less powerful for large organizations operating across multiple divisions, countries, and entities as this requires sophisticated consolidation processes and standardization, which might be difficult to maintain with OnPlan. Implementations depending on complexity can take longer due to the customization options and plethora of options to make models more accurate.

Incentivized

We're a mid-size organization working with a shoestring budget and an IT skeleton crew...not much room to dedicate resources to a platform like this fully. Having it SaaS based is helpful for system management through their Helpdesk system, and a single platform also helps streamline the knowledge needed by our developers when integrating other business aspects to Workday.

Incentivized

• Their onboarding with experienced CFO's is extremely helpful
• Their forecasting revenue models are easy to understand
• The budgeting and expenses section is better than anything else I've ever seen before.

Incentivized

• Integration with QBO and SFDC
• Integration with Google sheets and presentations
• User friendly and polished UE
• Easy Excel like syntax for modelling
• Flexibility to create custom formulas
• User roles and permissions
• Handling of fiscal year vs. calendar as well as switching between monthly/quarterly views

Incentivized

• It helps create dynamic plans for finances, operations and various functional units in an organization all under one platform
• It helps in scenario modeling to help analyze various business events and report by any number of business dimensions including channel, customer or product
• It can be integrated with any system including ERP, BI or CRM

Incentivized

• More youtube videos on walking through the software would be cool.

Incentivized

• Chart library or templates to quickly create polished Google charts
• More collaboration features for comments and questions to team members

Incentivized

• Dashboards are not the best for graphs/charts. However, I have heard of companies using the dashboards for forecasting/budgeting. I would like to see Workday Adaptive Planning demonstrate this part of the feature.
• Better security or locks to prevent deleting Actuals data - you are literally one click away from doing this.
• On the web-based reports, better functionality when needing to reverse the sign in calculations - right now it is only available for revenue vs. expenses.

Incentivized

For one we're in way too deep to not move forward with Adaptive. We're integrated with Workday, we do a ton of reporting with Adaptive, and it's working very well for planning and forecasting. No reason to look back or change course.

It is overwhelming at first, but once you really get to know it, you realize it is fairly simple and customizable, and then it has a lot more limitations than you first thought. Realizing those limitations and finding workarounds is when you know you've mastered the software.

Incentivized

There haven't been any lately. The only one issue I can think of is when there was an update in Adaptive that altered our reports. Before I realized there was an issue, Adaptive reached out to let me know, so that it could be fixed.

All aspects of Adaptive Insights perform well. One area that I wish was quicker was integration. When importing data from Intacct our accounting ERP platform, it can sometimes take 4 hours for the import to process. The earlier imports are done, the quicker they complete. My estimate for a quick upload is about two hours.

Whenever we have had any questions, issues, or concerns, the support has been quick and thorough. [This] allow[s] us to be able to fully resolve any issues, or be connected with the right group quickly to attain the result we were after; be it from simple formatting to adding new detailed reporting.

Incentivized

This was extremely helpful so that they could walk you through the model and teach you more about the complexity of various areas. It is most helpful when it is specific to your organization's model. The larger in-person trainings were helpful but they tended to be more generic and entry level. The trainings that are more tailored to your specific needs are the most helpful.

Incentivized

They often times tended to be way too generic or entry level. They would also become sales pitches to upgrade or get new Adaptive Planning products. The questions in the training would be very niche and specific to other organizations. They were rarely helpful to the group at large.

Incentivized

Trust the expertise of very strong 3rd party implementers. Having deployed Adaptive at a separate company before, I thought I knew it all (hubris, I know). Fortunately, I began to (very quickly) trust the judgment of our Carlson implementation team, and they provided invaluable insights and best-in-class processes that have benefitted me and my team greatly.

Incentivized

I wish I found Forecastr years ago. No other software has been able to simplify finances with models and forecasting in a very clear manner like this, plus, with the CFO addition, it's a breath of fresh air for the first time in 8 years of business with finances.

Incentivized

OnPlan provided the best tradeoff for customization, integrations, affordability, user controls, and maintenance/control of the financial model.

Incentivized

Workday became our choice because it is fully web-based and easily integrates with other systems. The learning curve for Workday was shorter than that of Dynamics. The reporting tools in Workday are more user-friendly than that of Dynamics. However Workday did not have Check Printing tools which are available in Dynamics. The organization started a project to digitize all financial transactions so it was not a priority feature. When it comes to scaling up the functionalities of Workday it was much easier than Dynamics.

Incentivized

Good read only seat access

Incentivized

We went from 2 users to 70+ users over a 2 year period of time. The application scaled wonderfully. 65 of those users were non-finance users so they were able to quickly learn the software and prepare budgets quickly and efficiently. That is the power of Adaptive and its ability to scale

This is now available in house at Workday which is convenient.

Incentivized

• With clear data, I'm able to make better financial decisions on hiring/spending

Incentivized

• More cost control
• More accurate forecasts / reducing of forecasting errors
• More accurate accounting close / detection of erroneous GL entries
• Time savings to update financial model / forecasts
• Time savings to create BvA reports

Incentivized

• It's facilitated a better financial literacy and management by the non-financial managers in the company, giving them a much better ability to see what they're spending, control it, and plan better in the future.
• It's hard to quantify the ease of model and version management, but we could never do what we're doing now with our current staff. It would take a small army to replicate anything close to what Adaptive pulls off using Excel, if it's even possible.

Incentivized