Anaplan is a great tool for any FPA organization
July 23, 2025

Anaplan is a great tool for any FPA organization

Matthew Carlson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Anaplan

I use Anaplan to build models for business users, i.e. planning, budgeting, and forecasting (PBF) models, that are customized to their business needs. With Anaplan we're able to connect all levels of an FP&A organization (from analysts to leadership) and beyond to other organizations throughout companies, such as Sales, Marketing, and HR. The models we implement typically incorporate detailed hierarchies with large datasets, transform that data and perform calculations to produce detailed forecasts at the lowest levels, and easily consolidate and aggregate those forecasts to produce high-level reporting. Leadership can then use these reports to analyze KPI's, simulate scenarios, strategize moves, make decisions, develop goals, and set targets across multiple internal organizations.

Pros

  • Integrates datasets from multiple sources
  • Empowers business users to build models
  • Connects people and organizations within a company

Cons

  • Workflow
  • Management Reporting
  • Chart Customization
  • Reduce hours needed to produce forecasts
  • Increase hours spent on analysis and strategy
  • Empowers leadership to be agile in a high-paced environment
In terms of how applicable Anaplan can be across many organizations it highly because it can be used as a tool to solve many diverse business problems. From a user experience point-of-view it also rates very highly. They've made huge improvements over the years to make the dashboards more user friendly and have added many intuitive features, such as table filtering, pivoting, sorting etc.
Creating financial forecasts in Anaplan was a big improvement over doing the same activity in Microsoft Excel. The main difference is that Anaplan makes it easier to build models based on large amounts of data and to forecast concurrently with many users across your organization. It does this at a high level of performance and you don't have to deal with your model crashing.

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 well suited for an FP&A organization that is having trouble managing too many Excel workbooks and other various separate systems. Anaplan offers a solution that can consolidate all important information into one place and allow for custom models that can be used to produce all types of outputs and reports. A well-executed Anaplan implementation will also reduce the amount of busy work (e.g. consolidating data dumps) and give business users more time to perform high-level analysis.

Anaplan Feature Ratings

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

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