Centage Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 9.4 out of 10

Score

9.4 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Centage are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Value-adding platform: According to several users, the Analytics Maestro Platform has been found to add tremendous value to their business operations. They appreciate the newer cloud-based version that eliminates size constraints and allows for seamless usage.

Responsive customer support: Reviewers consistently praise the platform for its extremely supportive and timely customer support. The quick response from the implementation and ongoing support teams in addressing any issues or concerns is highly valued by users.

Detailed budgeting feature: Many users find the detailed budgeting feature of the platform particularly useful as it allows them to work with shared chart of accounts, providing names and descriptions for better organization and clarity in financial planning. The option to upload budgets using excel-based templates simplifies the budgeting process further.

Reviews

12 Reviews

Centage (Budget Maestro & Analytics Maestro) - great reporting/budgeting tool

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

March 20, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our main use of the Centage tool has been around reporting actuals. We are a complex company with multiple subsidiaries, multiple currencies, multiple geographies and several verticals that cross-over each other.

Being able to report through analytics has shaved many hours off of our reporting cycle.

Pros

Reporting through Analytics Maestro cube
Budgets with segmentation (product class & departments)
Integrated with NetSuite

Cons

Integration with NetSuite was slow to set up
Would prefer to have transactional data in Centage from NetSuite, not just daily summaries

Likelihood to Recommend

In a simpler environment with less subsidiaries and currencies, set-up would have been quick, it did take quite some time, but now works perfectly.

Centage works great with simplifying and streamlining actuals reporting (and with budget comparisons). Budgets also allow upload which is quick and easy once you figure out the format.

We have many many budget holder, it would be nice if Centage had different user level pricing (perhaps they do) as most of our users only touch budgets and only 1 or 2 need full access.

Verified User

Director in Corporate (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

Centage is Great for Consolidated Reporting and Planning

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

March 19, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our current system's reports are outdated and difficult to manage. With Centage we are able to bring in our actual data, consolidate, create appropriate intercompany eliminations, and complete all of our financial reporting, including plan data, with consistency and accuracy.

Pros

Reporting Through Analytics Maestro
Handling complex calculations - called Drivers - to plan
Compiling, reporting and budgeting with a lot of different dimensions

Cons

A little more speed in making those complex calculations.
A little more speed deploying the data from actuals into the plan.

Likelihood to Recommend

Centage can do everything we need for a medium to large company with many locations and multiple companies. It does get a little slower to plan the more data you have but that can be overcome with uploading data from Excel.

Verified User

Manager in Finance and Accounting (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Centage: The only tool that solves your budgeting problems

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

February 7, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Centage to prepare annual budgets but also for monthly reporting package. We have a complex business with multiple locations and departments across the locations. We budget at a very granular level. We use a lot of dirvers and calculations when preparing budgets. Centage tool offers a lot of flexbiliby to set up the budgets to match the business specific needs.

Pros

flexibility to match your business needs
easy to see what calculations are incorporated in the budget and make changes easily
excellent reporting tool
upload/download of data is very easy

Cons

Collapsing rows in the reports - it was a good feature in Budget Maestro but removed in Planning Maestro
Undo button would be good to have
Navigation is still complicated in some areas and new users have difficulty to learn the tool

Likelihood to Recommend

Centage is suited for all types of business. This is what makes this tool so great. It requires some expertise in setting it up and depending on how complex the business is, it may take longer than expected. It's a complex system and if you are not involved in the implementtion it might be hard to learn what is does.

Verified User

Professional in Finance and Accounting (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

Centage: It's all Great

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

February 7, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have been a customer of Centage for over 12 years we started with Budget Maestro and have moved to Planning Maestro. We have a very complex budgeting process and Planning Maestro makes it so much easier. We have 40+ programs with up to 10 funders in some programs so very complicated and time consuming if you had to use excel. I am very pleased with this product, but Centage's best part is the customer and service support. Don't get me wrong I do like the product as well and they are always trying to find ways to improve it but supporting us when we need is what makes this company great. Thanks for all you do.

Pros

The ability to enter information as needed.
The ability to sort and see information in the way we need.
Customer Support

Cons

Head count is a bit strange as each period is considered one Headcount for a total of 12 per year, so we have to adjust when running reports
would love to be able to attach related expenses in payroll to a kind of employee instead of doing each individually. It's time consuming.
Have the help more available instead of having to log into separate place

Likelihood to Recommend

Centage is well suited for a company with high complex budgets.

Verified User

Manager in Finance and Accounting (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

12 years of experience

Rollups are a breeze with Centage!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

February 7, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Centage's Planning Maestro to prepare our annual budgets. Centage allows us to import a lot of information rather than having to manually key it. Another great time-saving feature is the ability to build hierarchies to do budget "rollups" for various owners and managers.

Pros

Allow data importing
Department / company rollups

Cons

Comparison reporting across years and across budgets / actuals.

Likelihood to Recommend

Centage is well suited for companies that manage a large volume of departments, cost centers, or entities.

Hope Turnbull

CFO in Finance and Accounting at Murphy Family Ventures LLC (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Working with Planning Maestro - Centage

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

February 7, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Centage's Planning Maestro for Annual Budgeting and Reforecasting purposes. It's really good as all the inputs entered by all the budget holders get consolidated in our income statement in real time. We can manage access to specific accounts, cost centers and project codes to each budget holder, which makes the process more efficient and minimizes errors. We also use they allocations methods, which are very useful in our case. There is also the possibility of managing different versions of Budgets and reforecasts.

Pros

Security setting at the level of the user
Expense allocation methods
Reporting of Income statement and others
Easy definition of parameters such as accounts, cost centers and project cods

Cons

We would need the actuals to be brought from our accounting system GP by project code. This is missing at the moment and we are a project driven organization.

Likelihood to Recommend

For Budgeting and re-forecasting, Centage is very good. The help desk is extremely efficient and helpful It's a robust and reliable system For actuals and Actuals versus budget, we are limited as the actuals data is not coming by project I had challenges with analytics maestro when I want to try very detailed reports

Maria E. Aramayo

Financial Accountant in Finance and Accounting at Oxfam Canada (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

View profile

My Experience with Centage Planning and Analytics Maestro

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

February 7, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Datalogics uses Planning Maestro for its annual plan and any updates. Any company worth its salt knows that planning is >50% of success! Having a real time web-based tool makes the planning process easier. Centage was able to do a one-way integration with our older ERP Dynamics SL, loading our actuals into Planning Maestro. The implementation and support we receive from Centage is very good. We were able to get up and running in the expected the frame.

Pros

Planning personnel with all the related benefit expenses is very accurate and we are able to forecast increases as well.
Storing separate versions of the budget allows us to finalize for the year and have access to the data while we update the default plan with any changes.
I ilke the way you can add intelligence see the detail of calculations below th eline item.
I like writing Planning Maestro reports to see drill downs of any item and tie them to our ERP Budget

Cons

The Analytics Maestro reports are pretty confusing to create and update. I wish it worked as well as Management Reporter. I continue to load budget into Dynamics SL and run reports there at the GL account/subaccount level
I wish that vendors and customers were based structures that could be auto-updated from my ERP like GL accounts. I have to add them manually.
Having to manually update our cube seems unnecessary. Shouldn't the cube update itself whenever we make a change?

Likelihood to Recommend

Any company that needs to do planning can benefit from Centage and Planning Maestro. It is suitable for cost sensitive companies. If you have an ERP without a good reporting tool, I wouldn't want to do all my financials in Analytics Maestro.

Verified User

Executive in Finance and Accounting (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Absolutely great product!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

February 5, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Planning Maestro to determine our budget numbers viewed in multiple ways. We gather information for many departments in our company and input that information into Planning Maestro. We also upload the actual sales and expenses to Planning Maestro, allowing us to create a limitless amount of reports showing our forecast for the year, or showing our actual compared to planned sales and expenses.

Pros

It keeps up with personnel and all aspects of it.
It allows us to input information into each location and department and filter each section in the same way.
It is very quick to update the cube and reports to see any changes you have made inside the budget.

Cons

The allocations of personnel do not work well for our company. We have to add multiple lines of each person in admin because our expenses get distributed to many departments.
The reports inside Planning Maestro should be able to collapse and expand.
There is not an easy way to track counts of sales from the plan to the report.

Likelihood to Recommend

Realizing how much detail I have to update at each year end, reminds me of how detailed you can go in Planning Maestro to get extremely accurate results based on so many variables.

Jennifer Weed

Controller in Finance and Accounting at Four Star Freightliner, Inc. (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

Planning Maestro - a success!

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

August 30, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using Planning Maestro to develop our annual budget and prepare monthly/quarterly financial statements for management and our Board of Directors. Before partnering with Planning Maestro, we used an Excel workbook to develop and compile our annual budget. This caused all sorts of issues when preparing the staffing plan, especially if there were last minute changes before finalizing.

For reporting, we previously used our ERP system, which is extremely difficult to create or modify financial reports. The analytics Maestro Excel add-in tool made creating adhoc reports within Excel simple and easy. You can create reports and still use all the great features of Excel for analysis.

Pros

Use of drivers to develop functions that become the foundation of a budget or forecast
Staffing Module
Copying or editing large amounts of departmental or business function data/budgets/forecasts
Implementation and ongoing support teams - thorough and quick to respond/take action

Cons

Copying line item details. Planning Maestro is good at copying large swathes of data, but copying single line items could speed up the process of adding new line item details.
Speed up the refresh rate of the Analytics Maestro tool

Likelihood to Recommend

I think Planning Maestro is well suited for small to medium-sized businesses. Larger organizations might find it challenging updating staffing within the tool. But if you can find a way, like we did, to group people together instead of budgeting every single individual, then it could work for organizations with more than 400 employees. If you like to budget using drivers and tools that make it simple to spread/allocate/use schedules, then Planning Maestro is right for you.

Blake Smith

CFO (Chief Financial Officer) in Finance and Accounting at Birch Tree Communities (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Transformative Budgeting

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

June 29, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our firm provides outsourced accounting and CFO staff. We work with many different industries and company sizes. We often get pulled into groups where cash management and budgeting concerns are at the top of the management's list. We see many groups try and do this with Excel and other tools, which has some level of success but often gets left or forgotten due to it being a cumbersome process. We will often recommend Centage's Planning Maestro and its budget tools to help these organizations deal with the fatigue that comes from using Excel-based techniques.

Pros

Planning Maestro can simplify and automates the budgeting process, by creating an environment where teams can collaborate and update data as needed.
The software uses historical data to generate financial forecasts. It enables users to create various scenarios, perform what-if analyses, and assess different business decisions on financial outcomes.
You can have real-time dashboards and reports, offering insights into key financial metrics, variances, and performance indicators.

Cons

Slightly heavier lift to get people trained on the new system compared to other tools on the market

Likelihood to Recommend

I've been a user for many years, moving from company to company, client to client, and this software has been my "go-to". The team at Centage has never let me down, whether in implementation, or general needs. I've been able to depend on them to continue to develop the product and listen when there have been items that need to be addressed. Companies that take a good hard look at this software will not be disappointed with its capabilities and what it can do for their organization.

BJ Thomson

Managing Partner in Corporate at Milestone Financial Engineers (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

11 years of experience

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Reviews and Ratings

Planning Maestro - a success!

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

August 30, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Use of drivers to develop functions that become the foundation of a budget or forecast
Staffing Module
Copying or editing large amounts of departmental or business function data/budgets/forecasts
Implementation and ongoing support teams - thorough and quick to respond/take action

Cons

Copying line item details. Planning Maestro is good at copying large swathes of data, but copying single line items could speed up the process of adding new line item details.
Speed up the refresh rate of the Analytics Maestro tool

Likelihood to Recommend

Blake Smith

CFO (Chief Financial Officer) in Finance and Accounting at Birch Tree Communities (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience