Anaplan Reviews

Once you get your head around it, it is a simple modelling tool that understands time and data structures. The more time spent planning it before diving in the better your end result will be. We all want to dive into new technology and I'm a firm believer of the 'play with a product to learn it' approach but on this one planning is worth the time spent ten times over.

Getting your head around it takes time and slips from memory easily. Focus on delivery and you'll be fine.

We now do our budgeting and financial forecasting through Anaplan, have built three of our four underlying business models, with the last one coming this year followed by a overarching strategic model that will tie them all together.

Anaplan is an incredible tool for modeling. You have the ability to create endless lists and dimensions that can be used for modeling. Imagine custom drop down menus, date fields, boolean check boxes, and much more. These modeling fields can be used to create great modeling! Also, Anaplan has the capacity to work within many different areas of the business. You can create an FP&A plan, inventory plan, sales territory and quota plan, sales compensation calculation, and really any business modeling you can think of. Other tools in this category cannot create models like this in other parts of the business. Finally, Anaplan manages to create this data real-time. Other competitors cannot create data real-time like Anaplan can.

Being a tool that can accomplish all business modeling needs, it can get implemented poorly.

FP&A, Sales planning, Sales compensation, and inventory planning.

I used Anaplan as a budgeting and forecasting tool to track MRR and ARR for a team of relationship managers. The fact that all relevant information is at your fingerprints to manage your forecasts with confidence.

You could also change the growth rate/growth method based on real time information, rather than rely only on historical data.

Also, you could connect your sales opportunities/stage from Salesforce to Anaplan, which will immediately adjust your forecast. Tons of really great functionality at your fingertips!

Multiple tabs often times caused the software to slow down.

When looking at data from tableau, software can be very slow, but not quite sure if it was an Anaplan issue or a server issue on our end.

We were trying to resolve the disconnection between our budgeting/forecasting mechanisms and our sales opportunities from Salesforce. As managers, we wanted to make every sales person accountable for their MRR /ARR forecast, while being able to make changes in real time, review, make adjustments based on seasonality or specific events affecting our customers, etc.

Anaplan exceed all our expectations !

The flexibility of Anaplan is fantastic. I like being able to have control of my model and make changes myself rather than having to work through our IT change process. Also the visibility into the components of our models is something we never had before moving to Anaplan. This helps us ensure our projections are more accurate and accepted by the Sales organization

Anaplan is it's own unique language. If you have no experience with it you have to plan on a learning curve and can't simply "Google it". You need to be willing to invest the time and effort into learning the material so it can be frustrating at times when you get stuck and there aren't a lot of quick, widely available, support options

Our industry experiences rapid change and we want to be able to plan and support that direction.

Personalized dashboard on a per employee basis, providing an abundance of information pertaining to an array of policies, contracts, dashboards, etc. It's essentially a one-stop shop for most things finance/payroll related, being able to effectively view and report on my compensation plans, my targets, my performance, my payroll information, etc.

It does require an Administrator to configure things properly on the back-end to be able to effectively utilize the tool (which I'm lucky to have) but perhaps a little more friendly of a UI so a training session to use the system isn't necessarily a necessity.

A great centralized tool, allowing all information pertaining to payroll, contracts, compensations, etc. to be detailed on a per employee basis, and accessible right at one's fingertips.

Keeping every employee up to speed regarding their payment plans, where they are on that plan to date, payout information, etc. Especially working on a sales team like myself, knowing these compensation details is paramount.

With Anaplan, connected planning has become easy. This cloud platform is being used by several organizations today and what I like best is the ease of use, flexibility and different slice-and-dice options provided by this tool. It is easy to grasp and build models!

Formatting capabilities of Anaplan are not its forte. It is sometimes a struggle when reports need to be fancy and output needs to be shown in pdf or excel format

Currently, We are using anaplan to do sales allocation and operational planning. The benefits are having all data at one place, it is easy to reflect one change in all places and makes a user's life easy since they can see all views in one page!

The main thing that I liked having everything in one view. I also could easily pull reports on my reps YTD Number. It was great to use during a 1-1 to show progress or to talk about strategy to get back to their goal.

The main thing that I disliked was that it wasn't connected to the drill down data. I couldn't click on the number to see what that number was comprised of. There also were a lot of days where it was down. As sales people, we are tracking our number daily.

Business problem that its solving- Visibility of Sales Performance in order to hit sales goals. The benefits that I have realized are- no manual tracking of sales numbers, rep accountability.

Anaplan makes quick work of organizing large amounts of data, and allows the user to present the data in whichever way they choose.

There are a few minor glitches that are a little frustrating, but don't affect the usability. For instance, when using a "weeks" timescale, you can only use the week number and can't change it to show a date (e.g. date of the Monday of that week).

Currently using it for our material planning needs, and it has allowed us to move completely out of excel for our Planning needs.

I like how it is a cloud erp solution. all users are sure that they are looking at the same data/dashboards. the speed is nice.

cannot apply conditional formatting to single cells. only can apply to an entire line item. wish there would be more charting options. dashboarding is a bit wonky and can spend a lot of time making sure it looks nice on a specific ration screen.

I am building models for forecasting. quickly analyze multiple what if statements and compare different regressions side by side.

The best part is the cloud focus and the versatility of using it for different types of businesses.

The differentiation of the software for different files, it can just be different modules.

Great tool but consider how to implement across different company functions

I am trying to solve the problem of different teams using a different type of product. For example its much simpler for a smartwatch manufacturing company to utilize this software instead of using different types for all functions.

Ability to customize the tool to easily extract the data necessary to make decisions.

Simple features that excel has are not present in Anaplan. For example, highlighting two cells with numerical values doesn't sum the cells.

Using Anaplan to create a collaborative sales forecast across multiple parties.

Dynamic work space, information is available the instant changes are made.

Difficulty in formatting reports, could be more intuitive.

Have reports that you are attempting to create in Anaplan created in Excel, allows you to evaluate and plan the model before building.

Creating and consolidating planning financial statements from Corporate to Business Unit and Department levels. Gained visibility into more the performance of the lower departments.

Being able to work in multiple currencies and flex/change exchange rates as required to support budgeting and forecasts

Can easily become a high volume data, but this is easily rectified by archiving the data templates.

Anaplan has provided us the ability to undertake consolidations of multi currency company accounts which use different accounting systems. It has provided simplification to a month end task that took a lot of time previously.

it's very flexible in what you want to report and model. currently we only use it for revenue and bookings reporting/modeling but definitely interested in other areas

everything must be defined, but this is why it's so flexible.

what ifs in modeling, but having the flexibility to do it quickly.

The ability to automate planning processes and take excel to the next level. Once you set up the anaplan model, it provides you with the ability to analyze your plans and data and make changes on the fly.

Setup is a huge hurdle. You need a model builder dedicated to the on-going maintenance and evolution as business processes change.

commissions planning