A solution that works, but needs work
January 22, 2015
A solution that works, but needs work
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Planful (formerly Host Analytics)
Host Analytics is being used across our entire company to forecast financials. We have about 50 users at the company using the product. We used to use Excel, but quickly outgrew the product because we need to have many people contributing to the forecast at the same time.
- It is functional and allows multiple users to enter budgets while allowing the finance department to capture financial projections
- We have never had a security issue with the product. It seems very secure.
- Customer support is very responsive. Senior leadership is also very willing to talk to customers.
- The platform currently only works in Internet Explorer and involves multiple plugins and user settings just to use. The system uses a microsoft excel webtools framework which is being phased out by microsoft. As a result, Host is working on getting onto a more user friendly and browser agnostic platform, but they are behind schedule
- Terrible user experience. While the system is functional at the end of the day, there seems to be very little focus at Host Analytics on UX. Tasks are often not intuitive or take much longer than they should because of either 1) bad design, 2) constraints of the system, 3) outright bugs in the software. The support team will tell you "here is a work-around" which often will get the job done, but requires an email to support to figure out the approach and then takes much longer than desired.
- No real-time decision making. Often companies want to make changes to a budget or forecast and see real-time how that impacts the forecast. Because of all the processing and refreshing that is needed after changes are made, it is virtually impossible to play around with assumptions and see results right away. It takes the system about 30 minutes to completely refresh and recalculate once we have made a change to some components of our projections.
- The major ROI here has been our ability to have multiple people contributing to the forecast at once. Our company has many different departments all of which are often budgeting at the same time. We have one version of the truth and don't have to constantly email around excel spreadsheets.
We demoed Adaptive Insights about a year ago and at that time it seemed Host Analytics was slicker and easier to use than Adaptive. However, in a recent release of Adaptive Insights, the software has jumped well ahead of Host in UX. I have not seen Adaptive's day to day functionality, so I can't compare on that level.