Anaplan is worth the money for any enterprise level planning
Updated December 12, 2024

Anaplan is worth the money for any enterprise level planning

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Anaplan

We mainly use Anaplan as our budgeting and forecast tool. It allows us to have a central hub for forecast owners from every department to to sign into, see their actual spend, and input forecasts. We then send the updated forecasts back out to our accounting and allocation systems. We also have various reports built to analyze the forecasts at different levels and by different slices of the data.

Pros

  • Forcing structure and auditability to processes that used to exist in spreadsheets
  • Strong calculation engine that can account for many dimensions
  • Formula Syntax that is not overly complicated and can be learned by the business in order to have ownership of their models internally
  • Easy imports and exports to integrate data with other systems

Cons

  • UX pages are not as customizable as most users would like
  • Anything that needs to be interacted with by different users simultaneously must be “dimensioned” by user. I understand this is the way the engine is set up and cannot be changed but it makes a huge challenge keeping the size of the models smaller
  • If you enter in a formula incorrectly, the model can “break” for minutes for all users
  • Any module using time cannot be viewed with attributes as columns before the time columns
  • Creating forecasts takes at least 1 week less time due to FPA not needing to track down and consolidate forecasts from the entire business. The department heads can log in and enter it themselves
  • Peace of mind knowing that every change ever made can be traced down to the individual cell level
  • No risk of spreadsheets with data not meant to be shared to everyone being sent out. Security provisioning is flexible and works 100% of the time
  • Centralized inputs for all drivers of forecasts
I think the back end modeling of Anaplan is probably close to a 10, the front end is just not very intuitive which is what is driving my lower score. Users familiar with excel or other common formula/coding languages will be able to pick up the modeling concepts fairly easily which is very helpful for successful implantations
Anaplan is cloud based which automatically removes the pain and risk that comes along with emailing around different versions of spreadsheets. Concurrent users can interact with different parts of the model at the same time greatly improving time spent adding inputs to the model. Anaplan forces a certain structure to the models that is much more scalable and easy to trace back than an excel model that may have many different exceptions and references after so many hands have been in the model.

Do you think Anaplan delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Anaplan's feature set?

Yes

Did Anaplan live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Anaplan go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Anaplan again?

Yes

Anaplan is an extremely powerful calculation engine and planning tool that is much better suited for enterprise level planning than spreadsheets are. It allows for user or role specific security provisions. It has a new native workflow functionality (or custom workflows can be built within the tool thanks to its flexibility). The biggest problem with Anaplan has always been its dashboards for users to interact with, as they can be hard to make user friendly given business requirements. However, it should be known that it is not meant to be a reporting tool and you can always export calculated results to a better suited system.

Anaplan Feature Ratings

9.0
Long-term financial planning
10
Financial budgeting
10
Forecasting
10
Scenario modeling
9
Management reporting
6
7.8
Financial data consolidation
10
Journal entries and reports
5
Local and consolidated reporting
6
Detailed Audit Trails
10
7.3
Financial Statement Reporting
9
Management Reporting
6
Excel-based Reporting
7
8.8
Personalized dashboards
5
Color-coded scorecards
10
Cost and profitability analysis
10
Key Performance Indicator setting
10
8.7
Flat file integration
10
Excel data integration
8
Direct links to 3rd-party data sources
8
Not Rated
Customizable dashboards
Not Rated
Ad-hoc Reporting ()
Not Rated
8.5
Publish to PDF
7
Report Versioning
10
Data Discovery and Visualization ()
Not Rated
10.0
Role-Based Security Model
10
Report-Level Access Control
10
6.0
Responsive Design for Web Access
5
Mobile Application
5
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
8

Using Anaplan

35 - Our core users of about 8 represent our finance department. The rest of the users mainly use the tool for inputs and represent most other areas within our business including technology, trading, and operations. Even though the majority of our licenses are using it for a more limited use, our smaller subset are getting the majority of the value out of it.
3 - I am the most experienced expert with the tool and am the go to for any support in the system, and we have 2 additional resources on our team that are skilled enough to at least diagnose issues. For any new enhancements or complex bug fixes, they would most likely need to be done by myself
  • Forecast creation
  • Calculations that are sent to other platforms we use
  • Visibility in to variances between actuals, plan, and forecast
  • Project cost estimation
  • Integrated to our purchasing tool to automate expenses into our forecast for new software contracts
  • Dynamic variance reports that allow us to compare many slices of data for different versions and time periods
  • Full workforce planning
  • Revenue tracking
  • Waterfall calculation modeling
Anaplan is a very strong multi-dimensional modeling tool that provides a calculation engine to empower a complex planning process. It is fairly easy to learn for those with experience in similar tools, or excel. It forces structure and auditability that spread sheets do not have, along with extensive security capabilities

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