Anaplan is a great tool for finance
November 04, 2016

Anaplan is a great tool for finance

Jake Cosenza | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Anaplan

Anaplan is being used as our financial planning, forecasting and reporting tool. We build departmental budgets, manage headcount costs, do scenarios/modelling, and prepare financial reports (Budget v Actuals, Executive Finance Summary, etc.). Anaplan addresses the problems of using Microsoft Excel for this process. It eliminates tons of manual 'grunt' work and allows our team to focus on analysis instead of copying/pasting and reconciling data.
  • Anaplan has incredible flexibility. It is very much like Excel because you can use it for virtually anything you need.
  • It simplifies large data sets and automates many processes like no other tool I've used in the past.
  • It is constantly gaining new capabilities (new charts/graphs, new formulas/functions, etc.) unlike other legacy products which don't really improve much.
  • As models get larger, there is definitely some lag in the calculation. This can get annoying for end users when they are using dashboards.
  • Sometimes there is too much flexibility -- can lead to wanting to use Anaplan for things that it wasn't explicitly designed for.
  • Reporting is still limited in some ways, more color options for example would be nice.
Anaplan has a much more powerful modelling engine compared to Adaptive Insights. Adaptive might have prettier dashboards, but their product is inferior at it's core. We were impressed by everything Anaplan could do and are glad that we chose it over the competition. We also are very impressed by Anaplan's customer success team and their knowledge.
Anaplan is great for a finance use case. Specifically, the reporting capabilities have greatly improved our monthly processes. Our Finance team used to spend 3 days monthly building reports in excel, now we can load data in about 15 minutes and all our reports are refreshed and ready to go.

Anaplan Feature Ratings

Long-term financial planning
9
Financial budgeting
9
Forecasting
9
Scenario modeling
9
Management reporting
9
Financial data consolidation
10
Journal entries and reports
10
Detailed Audit Trails
7
Financial Statement Reporting
9
Management Reporting
9
Excel-based Reporting
9
Automated board and financial reporting
10
Personalized dashboards
10
Color-coded scorecards
8
Cost and profitability analysis
9
Key Performance Indicator setting
9
Benchmarking with external data
10
Flat file integration
8