Improving all facets for FP&A with Host Analytics
September 29, 2015
Improving all facets for FP&A with Host Analytics
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Planful (formerly Host Analytics)
Host Analytics is being used by our organization for forecasting, consolidation, budgeting, and the majority of executive reporting. The finance team uses the product the most often, as they are responsible for the actual input. That being said, nearly all functions of the business touch Host Analytics in one way or another. Most end users use Host Analytics solely by means of receiving canned reports via email from finance; however, we do have several cost center managers actively logging into Host Analytics to review their spend and cost forecasts. There are several business problems Hos Analytics has addressed. The ability to load several exchange rates has allowed us to conduct "what-if" analysis regarding the effect on our bottom line caused by currency fluctuations. The overall structure of Host Analytics has allowed our team to create several different reporting structures (e.g. business manager, legal entity, financial reporting), which has greatly simplified our process for generating month-end reporting and has saved our company countless hours.
- The user interface is very easy to pick up. The result of this is very high adoption.
- The management of data hierarchies is incredibly easy to use and makes changes to business reporting/forecasting needs seamless.
- Customer service is very quick to respond in most cases that don't require a software developer to step in.
- Load times, especially when updating employee data, are longer than I have seen with other products.
- The use of data load from Excel and browser based input templates offers two solutions to load data, but this can also lead to confusion.
- Our company has struggled to get "seeding" to work properly. Seeding is the ability to reference multiple different forecasts to build a new forecast.
- Host Analytics has allowed our organization to better understand our financial performance and be able to plan for the future. Our organization had much less insight into our financials prior to adopting Host Analytics. Additionally, it has greatly reduced the error rate and time it takes to create month end reporting and ad hoc analysis.
I was not part of the selection committee. I can comment that it was compared against Adaptive Planning and Cognos.