Budgyt vs. Planful

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

Reporting and Spotlight have changed the game for us. Spotlight has brought dynamic reporting to our team and the rest of the office as well. With dynamic planning, we've spent more time doing analysis instead of running and creating the reports. Recently, we've spent less time analyzing and more time formatting, and Spotlight has brought the analysis back to FP&A.

Incentivized

• Combining departments (components of an entity or a component of various entity's income statement) or isolating departments (small slivers) of an entity's income statement. We can look at specific departments of specific entities together, with ease.
• Splicing / flipping reports into countless formats. Helpful for users of the financial statements that digest data/numbers differently than the financial accountants who prepare the numbers.
• It is relatively easy to import data from our Jonas accounting program into Budgyt.
• We've had prompt customer service when we've encountered issues and they were readily available during implementation.

Incentivized

• Creating forecasts for the month, quarter, and year
• Creating new variables by using variables pre-defined and that are new in the system
• Having a very simple setup in the reports section - not straying away from the old Excel model which most people are used to. I can speak for a lot of people when I say that tools that look new can easily be frightening! 😅

Incentivized

• Inside setting up HR forumlas, it should give more than one filter criteria.
• Application got slow after putting the information of HR module and formuals, need to speed up.
• Selection of multiple companies with different GLs can be an option where it is lacking.
• Didn't see the multicurrency feature, can be a good add on.

Incentivized

• Dashboarding could be more flexible and easier to use.
• Dynamic Reporting has room for flexibility with nesting, dimension names showing up instead of “All,” and overall flexibility.
• Make Analyze view in Spotlight more intuitive.
• A high-level onboarding guide to understanding the different components of Planful, data flows, and tips & tricks.

Incentivized

Our organization has increased our level of financial reporting and decreased the time it takes to build a budget with the Budgyt platform. Because our budget managers have access, it allows them a higher level of ownership for their areas.

Our new Comptroller understands the value of Planful, and we plan to utilize it further in the organization to enhance external reporting. Strangely enough, Planful had not previously been embraced by the former CFO, who argued that we were running two sets of books (of course, we were not). Fortunately, the before mentioned reconciliation of EBITDA to Net Income demonstrated that to the banks.

Incentivized

Incredibly easy to use and intuitive. Design is simple without lacking functionality. Limited learning curve makes it very easy to set up and start using, and with little practice it becomes incredibly easy to perform routine tasks, including monthly update of actual data, running and analyzing reports, as well as building budgets, forecasts, and 'what-if' scenarios

Incentivized

The tool is extremely adaptable, and it enables very quick querying to give us opportunity to gain live insights into the business. Given its adaptability, we are also able to create scenario analyses very quickly in rapidly changing environments. The formatting also enables us to provide this information in a very consumable manner.

Incentivized

I only give a 9 rating rather than a 10 rating because it seems that every day around 2pm we see a slowdown in the use of Planful. I have requested our internal IT department verify that it is not an internal issue and have been assured it is the tool. We have not yet reached out to Planful to do extensive research to solve this issue.

Again, the system is very reliable and, for the most part, runs very quick and smooth. When running larger queries, it does take some time, and during budgeting season our users experienced slower loading times, but nothing that raises concerns outside of normal network issues. Occasionally, as with any software we use, it will crash and you have to restart, but that does not happen very often.

James the founder always replies to my emails in a timely manner, even if overseas. Has not passed me on to a customer service support team member. Rob was great with the initial demos as explored the product to see if it was what we wanted. Online documentation and videos are very good

Incentivized

Sometimes we get great help when using Planful's support team and other times we don't. In particular, there is one person that often responds to our support tickets who is less than helpful, hence the reason for the 5 out of 10 rating. As a result, most of the time we reach out to our Planful consulting group as they provide faster and better support

We got little training on the tool after implementation. Did a lot of "trial by fire" learning about Planful. I don't think RSM really provided us all the details we needed to understand the tool and to know what we needed to train on. I don't know we knew enough about the tool to even ask the right questions and then they left and we used Planful support a lot.

Incentivized

This training is much more robust now than it was when we first implemented our Planful environment. Many times we can do a little research in the "help" portal and do not even need to reach out to support. They are continuously improving the training and information available to users.

Incentivized

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

Most of the issues in the implementation were self inflicted, the team at Top Down was great and did a good job managing hours and teaching our team how to best handle the system. The implementation went longer than expected as they always do but the GL and erp link was up and running quickly so we could build reporting

Incentivized

We selected Budgyt over other options because it is exceptionally easy to use, perfectly meeting all our budget management needs. Its user-friendly interface, robust functionality, and cost efficiency enabled seamless multi-department integration. Budgyt delivered the performance and financial insights we required at a fraction of the cost, ensuring maximum value.

Incentivized

Personally I have only used essbase in my work. Planful has a much easier platform to use both to put together results and to load data compared to the financial reporting platforms that I have used. Planful also has better dedicated tools to create reports and build in a dedicated software that is built to report on rather than building from scratch in an excel environment

Incentivized

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

From our experience, Planful is only used in 2 overhead departments in our organization. We easily added another overhead department, but they decided against using Planful for their workforce and financial planning. Removing them from our environment was extremely easy.

Incentivized

• time savings: cannot overstate how impactful Budgyt has been relative to our former excel-based, manually-intensive budget process
• financial insights: Budgyt is an incredible tool for putting financial data at users' fingertips, in formats and with details presented in a way that adds value to non-finance users and enables data-driven operational decision making

Incentivized

• Has allowed users to view a real-time P&L in a way they weren't able to do with Qlik.
• Budget to Actual analysis has become much more streamlined and actionable
• Long-range plan process has been significantly streamlined and a lot of time has been cut out of the process.

Incentivized