Anaplan, the tool that can bring all of your data together.
August 29, 2024

Anaplan, the tool that can bring all of your data together.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Anaplan

Anaplan is used for budgeting and forecasting for our headcount, operating expenses, and revenue. We take each part of our model and combine it to create our end-of-year financial statements. During the year we utilize Anaplans' versioning functionality to perform reforecasts and to track how we have been performing compared to our benchmarks. This helps us flag areas of improvement and be more proactive during the next cycle as to where resources need to be allocated. Anaplan allows us to be more collaborative with a cloud-based tool. Data is accessible to all users and we can see changes in real-time. We perform daily refreshes from our data warehouses to ensure there is no disconnect between data coming in and some other system. Prior to switching to Anaplan we were constantly trying to find the correct worksheet or a "final version" and had difficulty communicating a final budget effectively.

Pros

  • Cloud based platform that allows for real-time data and collaborative environment
  • Management of dimensions natively within the tool, minimized reliance on data warehouse
  • Ability to maintain multiple versions and run comparisons between them

Cons

  • The learning curve can be high for building and maintaining models from scratch
  • While flexible, the system still requires expert configuration and changes can be tricky
  • Model sparsity and performance can be an issue when data volumes increase greatly
  • Our month long close process has now been reduced to 3 days to complete with a 2 day review
  • We are able to be more accurate in our budgets thanks to our ability to manage and view prior data
  • Our ability to collaborate in a cloud-based platform has greatly reduced our errors in reporting.
Anaplan acts as a sandbox and can be tailored directly to the users needs. Therefore its usability is high since a seasoned architect can theoretically create a model for many use-cases, even non standard ones. Its dashboarding functionality allows architects to design a front-end that is more "user-friendly" and does not require the training that architects need to construct it. As such, someone can be a complete novice with Anaplan and still provide value using the tool as an end user.

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 best suited for an environment where planning is currently being done offline, especially in excel files. Transferring the process from excel into Anaplan allows the business to maintain a single source of truth of all of the financial and planning data for the future. Collaboration can be done in real-time rather than exchanges emails with an excel file. It is more secure than using google sheets as well to collaborate. User security and access can be maintained and advanced read/write permissions are controlled by model admins.
The only scenarios I see that it is less appropriate are when the cost doesn't fit the budget for the business. Anaplan is appropriate once a business is scaled up quite a bit and already has processes in place. It is not a solution when a business is young and still trying to find its footing.

Anaplan Feature Ratings

Long-term financial planning
10
Financial budgeting
10
Forecasting
10
Scenario modeling
8
Management reporting
7
Financial data consolidation
8
Journal entries and reports
6
Local and consolidated reporting
8
Detailed Audit Trails
10
Financial Statement Reporting
9
Management Reporting
6
Excel-based Reporting
5
Personalized dashboards
10
Color-coded scorecards
10
Cost and profitability analysis
8
Key Performance Indicator setting
8
Flat file integration
10
Excel data integration
10
Direct links to 3rd-party data sources
10
Customizable dashboards
8
Publish to PDF
5
Report Versioning
10
Role-Based Security Model
10
Report-Level Access Control
10
Responsive Design for Web Access
10
Mobile Application
7
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
7

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