Anaplan is great for complex modeling
May 12, 2017
Anaplan is great for complex modeling
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Anaplan
It's being used across the whole organization as an expense management/budgeting tool. It also houses our 3 statements. We do our bi-annual planning and ongoing budget variance analysis in Anaplan for every department, from headcount planning to stock based comp forecasting. We house all of our assumptions in Anaplan. We also store multiple versions of the model to lock plan/use as scenario forecasting/planning.
- Its flexibility is key in building out our expense management model as well as planning ahead for housing our complicated billings/sales comp models.
- The freedom it gives us in creating various dashboards is very helpful - makes it visually appealing to our users.
- The lists/modules/dashboard setup is easier to use than other cloud based financial planning systems.
- There is no functionality to insert comments into certain data cells like Adaptive does.
- You can't combine monthly input cells in the same view as fields like "Business Unit, Vendor, Expense Account" etc. Monthly input cells need to be in a separate module/view as the module with said various fields.
- This is more of an enhancement request but it'd be nice to trace precedents easily without drilling down/referencing different source modules.
We were considering Adaptive Insights. Anaplan had much more functionality, flexibility and is lot more powerful in dealing with multi-dimensions/channels/theatres/business units/etc. We are planning for Anaplan to house our complicated billings model and hopefully sales comp models at some point. Anaplan is fit for this complexity. Adaptive is easier for budget owners to use - but has a lot of limitations on flexibility/more complex structures.