Budgeting and Reporting Software Selection: What Are the Best Options for Upgrading from Excel?
A company using Great Plains and FRx is evaluating replacing its spreadsheet-based budgeting process. Candidate solutions include SaaS products such as Host Analytics and Adaptive Planning, as well as on-premises options like Prophix, Planning Maestro, Anaplan, and SolverUSA BI360. Users are concerned about mobile reporting capabilities, cost control, and a scale of approximately 50 users, and are seeking community advice.
We are currently evaluating and deciding which budgeting and reporting software to adopt, to replace our current process of managing budgets through large spreadsheets. After extensive research and leveraging insights from this forum, we understand that there are multiple options available in the market. We hope that some reporting and report generation features can be used on iPads or other mobile devices, so we would like to know if any specific solutions stand out in this area. We are torn between SaaS solutions (such as Host Analytics or Adaptive Planning) and on-premise solutions (such as Prophix, Planning Maestro, Anaplan, and SolverUSA's BI360).
We currently use Great Plains as our general ledger (GL) software and FRx as our reporting tool, but we are not sure if this is the best reporting software. Additionally, we use a proprietary software based on SQL Server 2008 R2 to manage our overall business and collect other operational data.
We obviously want to control costs, with a total user cap of around 50, covering different access levels from administrators to read-only users, but we plan to expand this number in the future.
Thank you for any suggestions.