Anaplan is worth the money for any enterprise level planning
December 12, 2023

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 dimensions of the data.
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
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

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