Practical View of Host Analytics
July 22, 2016
Practical View of Host Analytics
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Planning
- Reporting and Analytics
Overall Satisfaction with Planful (formerly Host Analytics)
I have used Host at two companies. Both of them had the entire budgeting process and forecast process within Host. One company had the user base as cross functional managers from many departments with heavy use by sales leaders and cost center owners. The second company the user base was finance controllers throughout the country who forecasted for their entire location. In both cases the primary business problem it addresses is to help facilitate a more accurate and faster way to execute the budget and forecast process. The software tool gives the administrators the control to ensure consistency in process but also gives a lot of flexibility to customize to meet specific business needs. It is especially helpful year to year for budgets or month to month in forecasting with speeding that up as data can just be pulled into new scenarios and that's where the big time savings is relative to updating Excel files.
- Ability to roll from one period's scenario to another. Leveraging templates designed once, they can be deployed to many entities and to a new scenario quickly without hardly any prep work. Spreadsheets required manual updating of many tabs and with new data. This is more seamless.
- Ability to shift a forecast scenario to have a new month of actuals and overwrite previously forecasted info with actual results.
- Flexibility to design templates and budget entities around the needed process from an input, roll-up, and approval process. Allocations can also be semi-automated using a template structure to integrate inputs from other units or departments to drive other calculations.
- Reporting is fully customizable to be automatic and streamlined once built.
- Reporting can be very technical in nature. Once built it is very powerful but maintenance takes a strong programmatic mindset.
- While most anything is possible in Host's ability to be customized to meet specific needs, a tangled web can be designed that requires good administrative know how of key power users to know where to look when something strange occurs. The tools are there to do it but sometimes complexity is needed to drive and automate.
- Seeding of scenarios can be finicky and something that has to be well understood before proceeding. While seeding is powerful and essential to easy routine in forecasting, knowing what not to do on initial builds of templates will help. Sometimes templates get built with a get the data in mindset but not to facilitate seeding so that needs to be better understood before building templates goes too far.
- Saved a couple weeks of budget prep of templates in second year of use.
- Allowed for less data integrity checking because of controls in place allowing more time to analyze data produced for forecast/budget and less time ensuring it's accurate.
- Host did a great job of stepping up with technical assistance and time spent redesigning things that could have been built better to ensure optimal use going forward.
We chose Host for the balance between cost and capability. Host seemed to be a mature and complex enough tool to handle tough use cases such as my company. They didn't have any glaring holes in our use case. Many of the other options we looked at that were smaller seemed like we would break them from a size or complexity standpoint.