A successful budgeting and forecasting process can be the difference between your business thriving and meeting its key objectives versus missing important deadlines, falling short of objectives and constantly trailing the competition.
Navigating economic uncertainty requires agility, adapting to change and responding proactively to unique business challenges and opportunities.
Budgeting and forecasting are fundamental to FP&A. Planning your financial resources, estimating revenues and expenses, analyzing profitability these are the foundations on which winning organizations achieve growth and sustainability. But without instant access to accurate, trustworthy data, or the ability to adjust your proposed budgets and forecasts in seconds through automation your finance team cant enable your organizational leaders to make faster, data-driven decisions. Your team needs a platform thats easy to use, feature-rich and enables collaboration.
But no solutions are created equal. So what should you look for when evaluating the markets best technologies?
Read on for an overview of the markets top seven budgeting and forecasting solutions. Well look at the pros and cons of each to help you choose the solution your team needs to plan for anything.
Finance teams use budgeting and forecasting software to plan their financial resources. This software enables them to consolidate financial data across disparate departments across the company. Only after department managers submit their respective budgets can finance teams create company-wide budgets and forecasts.
Budgeting and forecasting solutions automate the consolidation and updating of budgets and forecasts, enabling more than just confident managerial decisions. This software also saves finance teams from many hours of manual, tedious labor, ultimately letting them focus on what matters most: the analysis. Thats why top budgeting and forecasting solutions include advanced corporate performance management (CPM) features, such as financial modeling, scenario planning, business intelligence and data visualization capabilities.
To enable your organizational leaders to make confident, data-driven decisions and your finance team to spend more time on analysis, your budgeting and forecasting solution should have:
Now let's get to the pros and cons of the markets seven best budgeting and forecasting solutions.
Vena is the only complete FP&A platform powered by agentic AI and built to amplify your Microsoft experience.
With the Vena Copilot Suite, finance, operations, and business teams can plan, forecast, and analyze faster—right in the Excel interface they already know. Vena connects your people, processes, and source systems to streamline workflows, enhance accuracy, and scale decision-making across the organization.
From automated budgeting and forecasting to variance analysis and AI-driven discrepancy detection, Vena helps you generate dynamic reports and gain insights at speed. With Power BI Embedded and a centralized Connected Data Hub, you can slice and dice your financial data across departments, entities, and business units, all while maintaining enterprise-grade governance.
If your business runs on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Vena’s native integration brings ERP data directly into your forecasting models, helping elimina manual exports and accelerating time to insight. For a limited time, new customers using the BC connector can receive one year of Vena free and 40% off implementation.
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| Native Microsoft Excel User Interface Offers a native Excel experience, including all formatting and custom formulas |
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| Collaboration and Sharing Lets you collaborate, tag and comment directly in Excel |
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Central Database |
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Integrations |
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Process Management |
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Security and Compliance |
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Modeling |
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Embedded Leading BI Capabilities |
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Explore Vena in action - Request a Demo today!
Planful is a cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM) platform designed for large budgeting and forecasting teams to help streamline planning, consolidation, reporting and analytics. Core features include automation, data analysis and planning process improvement.
Anaplan is an enterprise-class business modeling and planning solution which offers forecasting and scenario modeling capabilities with real-time access to data and collaboration.
Prophix's software is designed mostly for finance teams at mid-market organizations. It improves profitability and minimizes risk by automating budgeting, forecasting and reporting for better decision making.
Prophix is available in the cloud or on premise.
Prophix is a solution for companies looking for a single source database that will improve their budgeting process and require a highly structured budgeting and forecasting tool that is cloud based or on premise.
Workday Adaptive Planning is an enterprise planning and analysis solution designed to empower collaboration, insights and agility. It offers budgeting and forecasting functionality for organizations of all sizes with customizable offerings for different use cases.
Workday Adaptive Planning is a solution for businesses already using Workday HCM and looking for a cloud budgeting and forecasting solution to be adopted across the organization.
Datarails is a financial planning and analysis platform that offers automation, visualization and consolidation capabilities. Finance teams can benefit from the spreadsheets and financial models of Excel while automating their financial reporting and planning.
Datarails is a solution for finance teams whose financial models are in Excel and want to maintain Excels familiarity and ease of use.
Cube is a budgeting and forecasting platform that provides real-time financial and operational data access, enabling strategic planning, reporting and analysis within a spreadsheet environment with flexible use cases across functions.
Cube is a solution for businesses that prioritize Google Sheets compatibility with data consolidation, flexible dashboards and reports.
Budgeting is the process of planning your company’s revenue and expenses for a specific time period, typically the upcoming fiscal year. It involves allocating financial resources based on strategic goals and expected performance. Most budgeting cycles take between three to six months and include the preparation of key financial statements like the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement.
Forecasting is a continuous process that analyzes historical trends and current data to project future results. Unlike budgeting, forecasts are updated regularly, often after each month-end or quarter-end cycle. Forecasts help organizations stay responsive by providing updated projections for revenue, expenses, and other key metrics.
You can learn more in our ultimate guide to budgeting and forecasting.
Budgeting and forecasting are at the heart of every financial function in your business—from scenario planning and financial modeling to workforce and cash flow planning.
These processes provide the insight needed to fund daily operations, allocate resources efficiently, and plan for future growth. Budgets and forecasts are used by business leaders and stakeholders to track financial progress, adjust key performance indicators, and guide strategic decisions.
That’s why having budgets and forecasts that update automatically, and are always accessible to stakeholders is critical.
They form the foundation of your FP&A strategy and enable faster, more confident decision-making across the business.
Update your forecasts on a recurring basis. While some businesses perform financial forecasting after every quarter-end cycleor even year-end cycleits best to perform a financial forecast after each month-end. Some businesses even update their forecasts every week.
Once your latest actuals are confirmed in the financial close, update your forecasts immediately. This gives your business partners a clearer, more accurate view of how your business is performing against your budgeted goals.
Heres how to generate reliable financial forecasts:
Your strategic financial functions are charged with delivering insights that accelerate company-wide, data-driven decision making.
To enable these FP&A processes such as workforce planning, cash flow planning and scenario planning your finance team needs a budgeting and forecasting process that provides that data instantly and accurately.
Without budgets and forecasts built from trusted data at your stakeholders fingertips, your team cant enable your organizational leaders to plan your company's future. Thats why selecting a new platform is important to achieving company growth and sustainability.
After evaluating each solutions pros and cons, consult your team to determine which software your end users can quickly learn, collaborate within and will actually adopt to build a winning budgeting and forecasting process.