Anaplan vs. Budgyt

Anaplan is best suited for strategic planning initiatives in industries like CPG, Manufacturing, FS, Pharma. It can handle multiple use cases for each function in the company like Supply chain, Finance, Sales and more. It is one of the best tools I have seen in scenario modelling. It is not suitable for very detailed level planning, essentially execution level eg. Production scheduling.

Budgyt is great for instant consolidation of a multi-department and multi-entity organization. It has strong hierarchy and roll-ups at various levels. User setup and security is straightforward, with ability to restrict data to only department heads over a project. Excellent capability in salary and benefit calculation, for instance down to each type of state and federal tax, and each type of employee health benefit with individual cost as specific as necessary. Strong export functionality.

Incentivized

• Anaplan can scale as your business grows, for example adding new regions into to your geographical hierarchy.
• Anaplan is flexible and can do anything you want it to, there are no tables pre-configured that you need to fix your business process into.
• Reading formulas in Anaplan is straight forward with a quick learning curve.

• budgeting: building annual budgets from the ground-up
• financial reporting: Budgyt includes a number of great options for navigating financial reports
• analysis (& reporting): the ease and flexibility of configuring and using data tools allow for detailed analysis, and numerous options for accessing data to enable effective analysis and reporting views

Incentivized

• Ability to decide if to apply the formula or a manual input on front end for each line item
• Real Time Data Transfer across models. Currently Data is transferred using Processes across different models. Having a functionality to access data from any model in real time would be great

• The ability to remove %'s entirely from reports, instead of only partially removing %'s from a report.
• The formulas C2C and FOAs can be confusing to set up. I think more explanative data ---- hovering over question marks alongside cells you must complete as a suggestion --- in this module would be useful. These formulas work great once you trial & error your way into them operating. But we find their initial set-up a time commitment. We don't want to watch how-to videos each time we set them up. The hover/clarifications of what certain cells mean would be very helpful.

Incentivized

Anaplan is a very strong multi-dimensional modeling tool that provides a calculation engine to empower a complex planning process. It is fairly easy to learn for those with experience in similar tools, or excel. It forces structure and auditability that spread sheets do not have, along with extensive security capabilities

It is awesome, will never go back to the spreadsheet. Just paid for our second year. It does everything we need. Slick interface for data entry, easy to use and run reports with a few clicks to get what you want. great data comparison, flexible to be able to see monthly totals from prior year or other scenario when entering in the data sheet

Incentivized

Anaplan is interesting because it is at the same time easy to use and difficult to use. An end user can navigate a well-constructed app, being pointed in the right direction every time they feel a slight bit of confusion, and find everything they need in what feels like a straight line. Similarly, a model builder (developer of sorts) can have the exact same experience, but the journey is longer and more complicated. End users have great experiences with Anaplan, but sometimes model builders have a frustrating one. That is not to say model building is hard (because it truly is not), but things change, and when things change in complex systems, the effort required simply to investigate where a model builder needs to make an adjustment may frustrate them but also frustrate their non-technical bosses. However, the reality is that with complicated businesses, complicated business problems, come complicated solutions. It is actually a testament to Anaplan's capabilities that it has taken on the biggest problems at the biggest companies. It may be daunting to adjust it in those environments, but at least you know it did meet the needs there, which is more than most tools can say.

We have not encountered any issues with Budgyt’s limitations, given the number of departments and the volume of data we pass to the tool. I have no reason to give it anything less than a 10; the only limitation so far is that we don’t have full API integration yet. Once that is finalized, we will be seamlessly integrated across all of our financial platforms and tools.

Incentivized

There are very few outages. Maintenance is scheduled on two or three Saturdays per month, so as not to affect businesses. When there is an outage, users are kept informed of progress to restore the platform and typically this takes no more than an hour. Anaplan customer support is very responsive if we ever have questions about platform issues

Everything is calculated in memory in the cloud. It's nearly instantaneous updates when you make changes. The only time things get a little slow is when you have a massive model with very intricate calculations...but "slow" for Anaplan is not what I would call "slow" for something like Hyperion. We used to have Hyperion calcs that ran for 60 mins before you could use data. The equivalent would be 60 seconds in Anaplan.

Incentivized

Support quality has dropped since Thoma Bravo has taken over. I think some serious re-focus needs to happen here -- part of the beauty of being in the Anaplan community was how involved you felt in it before. Before I didn't dread sending a support ticket, now I am starting to.

During my first year of working within the budget software, I had to go through some training while trying to meet deadlines for meetings. The team at Budgyt was very accommodating and made sure I was equipped with the knowledge that I needed to be successful

Incentivized

In my opinion, in-person training is always the best if you have the option to do so. This allows real-time interactions with the instructions, whereas the online training I took required me to write-down questions, email them, and wait for responses. This slows down the process, as you can imagine. That said, in-person training is an extra cost and it likely isn't needed for everyone. I would suggest selecting a small number of people to take in-person training and then having them act as mentors to the rest of your team. That way, as the rest of the team takes the online training, they have a resource to help them in real time.

Anaplan training materials are clear, simple, easy to understand and to follow. Visuals are excellent. The vendor is good at updating training materials in a timely manner and encouraging users and administrators to keep coming back to Academy site for refresher courses or new feature courses. I really like their interactive diagrams

The platform allows a flexible implementation mechanic to be put in place, since the possibilities and functionalities are vast and there are very few things the tool cannot do well. The solutions for the financial planning and the integrated business planning we put in place were easily adopted by the end users and their day-to-day work was made easier.

We were fortunate to have the founder lead us through a video conference to teach our users how to use the system. Totally invaluable!

Incentivized

Anaplan and these other tools are very similar. I cannot say that I selected Anaplan over them as I have worked with and been involved with setting up a number of tools for clients. They all have their advantages and Anaplan is a very strong tool in the cloud planning space

Other than Hyperion, which is in a different league and more suitable for much larger organizations, I would say that Budgyt compares very favorably. We moved from Great Plains to Sage Intacct, and evaluated their planning solution at the time of implementation. We were very underwhelmed by the management reporter tool that we used with GP, and budgeted with Excel prior to moving to Sage. We began looking at several other products alongside Budgyt & Sage's solution, but were so impressed by Budgyt that at its price point it was a no-brainer. We liked Sage's tools plenty, but felt that Budgyt could do more and cost less, so opted to go this route despite the lack of direct integration.

Incentivized

The platform is highly flexible and can be deployed across multiple departments and locations, supporting growth and varying business needs effectively. Its cloud-based architecture allows for scaling model size and user access as required. However, there can be some challenges with performance and model complexity as the scale increases significantly, which slightly limits its scalability in very large or highly complex environments.

The ability to budget at multiple organizational levels is central to Budgyt's design. These levels can be regions or product lines or departments, which are all easily rolled up to a consolidated organizational view. Reporting back against these levels is also built-in to the system.

Incentivized

• Anaplan's implementation led to a significant reduction in planning cycle errors and bugs, streamlining processes and improving overall accuracy in data inputs
• Standardizing the planning process and enabling cross-functional collaboration through Anaplan enhanced our ability to adapt swiftly to changing business needs, resulting in improved agility in decision-making
• The platform's capabilities, especially in Demand Planning and Supply Chain, positively impacted our ROI by optimizing resource allocation and solving complex business problems efficiently across multiple functions

• It has been a huge time saving for us when trying to forecast for changing personnel and contractors
• It has also created a portal that department managers can use to drill down on their costs without risk they will see information they shouldn't
• We have also used it to replace manual management reports created on spreadsheets and this has also saved a significant amount of time.

Incentivized