We are a small (50 person) business with an ERP system that is geared much more to inventory than
Software for cash flow reporting and budgeting.
Answers
What is the ERP system, and do you want to integrate with it?
I recommend Adaptive Planning. I first worked with them over 4 years ago when I implemented the software to do budgeting and forecasting for a 100 person service company I was the
What is not too expensive, there's a big range of choices out there....
There is always
Barbara,
One option is Alight Planning, a driver-based financial modeling tool. Alight is a low-cost solution yet robust enough to handle your modeling and forecasting needs.
Mark
Hi Barbara,
Second Alight vote. I have some experience with Adaptive Planning (mainly implementation), and more with Alight. I lean towards Alight. It was much faster and easier for me to get up and running with a working budget. I was able to do get there with minimal handholding (professional services) from Alight. That saved us several thousand dollars (vs. AP). I also like that it resides on an in-house server, vs. being a web-based application.
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Stu,
Is there any way you can give me 5 minutes on the phone to discuss Alight? Would love to hear your version of pros and cons and see what type of business they worked well with.
Mark
Barbara;
We have been using Adaptive Planning for over 4 years now. When we implemented the software we had about 350 employees and have since grown to over 800. They have allowed us to Plan/Forecast/Analyze our company while we've grown. Also, they have been consistently adding new, useful features to their software. Actually, they have a new release coming up this weekend I believe. Since the software is hosted and managed by them, all these upgrades have been seamless.
The costs are very reasonable and the benefits have easily out weighted the costs my a large factor.
Good luck with your project!
We have been using Adaptive for over 5 years and it does everything we need. There is some startup cost/time but its worth it.
this might be an interesting, very low-cost approach:
http://upyourcashflow.com/cm/Home.html
There are many vendors out there these days that would be a fit for the SMB world. I would look into Adapative Planning, Host Analytics, Anaplan, and Alright Planning. Planguru is a cheaper alternative to these others, but I felt it is fairly limited and not going to be scaleable if you grow. All these vendors have their strengths and weaknesses. I would suggest looking into them and if your interested in the solutions getting a quote from all of them and compare. I went through the entire business requirement and RPF process with all these vendors and currently implementing Adaptive Planning.
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Thanks. I have Planguru and previously looked at Alight Planning. I wonder whether you would be able to share your findings on the relative Total Cost of
Are there any programs that can import data from QBs and then have the ability to enter projections for 4 to 6 months. I prepare my cash flow projections in excel and show the actual data for prior months and project estimates for 4 to 6 months for planning purposes. Are there any suggestions to help automate this process?
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PlanGuru does that and so much more. You should try the free trial Kirsten
We have a database for QB that will pull all your data from
Barbara, you will first need to determine your budget/what you are willing to spend all in. You then need to decide if you want to go cloud based or server/pc based. Adaptive, Prophix, etc are going to be $10,000 plus and will take a few days/weeks to implement. Email me and I'll show you a good checklist to use to help guide you through this process.
I recently watched an Adaptive VAR do an installation of Adaptive on top of a troubling looking chart of accounts and it worked very well. It seemed to be built for the user graduating from Excel, codifying the various rules that can be difficult to update and manage in Excel.
The implementation person was not intimidated by letting a colleague hand him an unfamiliar accounting system and chart of accounts and demonstrating the install on the spot.
I've used Sage 50 for years (since it was DOS-based). Currently, I use Sage 50 Quantum 2014. The cost is a little over $3K (5 simultaneous user licenses included), but I'd pay $8K with no hesitation if that's what they wanted for it. You can purchase licenses for up to 40 simultaneous users before you would need to consider a further upgrade.
I just visited your company website and Sage 50 Quantum will certainly fulfill your needs and wishes. There are built-in
Sage has done a remarkable job of vertically aligning their offerings, which will allow your business to easily transition to a more robust version as it grows over time (Sage 100, 200, 300 etc).
With this limited number of requirements it is difficult to tell what would be the best solution for you. Many vendors and users will tell you what they do, ranging form Excel (which is not an budgeting solution, it's a personal administration tool due to no central database, no workflow, no stored business rules, no security) to the professional solutions. I would recommend IBM Cognos TM1, it's fast, does budgeting, planning, forecasting, cash flow calculation/planning, analysis, business user administration, has different front ends, workflow and approval, ...
Number of employees may not always be a good judge of the complexity of the business, but we are a midsize company with 1500+ employees that is totally dependent on Excel for budgets and forecasts.
Thank you all for your responses.
I have managed cash flow forecasting at $100M+ companies with a very simple and inexpensive tool: EXCEL.
For cash flow forecasting you should look for a package that allows you to forecast the entire chart of accounts balances, and in sufficient detail, so you can get an accurate forecasted balance sheet and statement of cash flows. You may want to look into Budget Maestro from Centage Corporation (www.centage.com), which seems to be doing what you're looking for.
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