The 7 Best Budgeting and Forecasting Software Tools for 2023

Navigating economic uncertainty requires agility, adapting to change and responding proactively to unique business challenges and opportunities.

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.

Budgeting and forecasting are fundamental to FP&A. Planning your financial resources, estimating revenues and expenses, analyzing profitabilitythese 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 forecastsin seconds through automationyour 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.

What Is Budgeting and Forecasting?

Budgeting is the process of planning your companys revenue and expense figures for a specific period of time, usually your upcoming fiscal year. It involves identifying available cash flows and allocating financial resources for your companys required spending.

It usually takes between three to six months to complete an annual budget, which includes creating financial statements such as the balance sheet, income statement and cash flow statement.

Forecasting is the process of analyzing historical trends in order to predict future business results based on your companys most up-to-date actuals.

This is performed regularly after financial statements are released, usually after every month-end cycle or every quarter-end cycle. Forecasts show summarized projections of revenues and expenses.

How Is Budgeting and Forecasting Used?

Every one of your businesss financial functionsincluding scenario planning, financial modeling, financial planning, workforce planning and cash flow planningrelies on your budgeting and forecasting process.

Insights gained from your budgets and forecasts help you determine how youll fund the companys day-to-day operations, use its assets efficiently and plan for the future. Your business partners and organizational leaders review your budgets and forecasts to analyze financial progress, update key performance metrics and assess business performance.

Thats why the ability to automatically update your budgets and forecasts instantlyand have them at your stakeholders fingertipsis key to your FP&A. Its the foundation on which your finance teams functions are built, and is critical to strategic planning and accelerating data-driven decision making across the business.

How Do You Do Financial Forecasting?

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:

1. Identify key metrics.
2. Gather your latest actuals and automatically import  them into your forecast template.
3. Determine the timeframe for your forecast.
4. Calculate trends based on your historical and year-to-date actuals.
5. Apply those trend calculations to your real-time numbers to come up with forecasted results.

How Can Budgeting and Forecasting Software Aid Finance Teams?

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.

How To Choose the Best Budgeting and Forecasting Software Tools?

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:

• Automated consolidation
• Pre-built budgeting and forecasting templates
• Intuitive workflow tools for task automation 
• Inherent commenting and collaboration capabilities built into the templates
• Support for top-down, bottom-up driver-based budgeting and forecasting
• Capability to leverage historical/previous budgets or scenario data when entering data for variance analysis when creating budgets and forecasts
• Driver-based scenario modeling and what-if analysis
• Advanced security and company-wide budgeting tools
• Flexible integrations with ERP, GL, CRM, HRIS, etc.
• Strong integration with Microsoft productivity tools such as Excel, Power BI and PowerPoint
• Ability to import Excel, CSV, flat files

Now lets get to the pros and cons of the markets seven best budgeting and forecasting solutions.

The Best Budgeting and Forecasting Software

1. Vena

Vena is a cloud-based complete planning platform that empowers finance, operations and business teams to grow their businesses by connecting people, processes and systems to streamline and scale. 

The platform automates budgeting and forecasting, variance analysis, identifies discrepancies, and builds ad-hoc reports for your business. With a familiar Excel interface and Power BI Embedded, Vena also analyzes your companys financial health by slicing and dicing budgeting and forecasting data across different entities, departments, business units, etc. 

Key Functionality and What Vena Does Well:

Best For:

• Vena is suitable for companies that require a structured process and planning controls of pre-built budgeting and forecasting processes, or for companies that want to customize a pre-built solution for their unique requirements and needs

Explore Vena in action - Request a Demo today!

2. Planful

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.

Key Functionality and What Planful Does Well:

• Performs data collection to help businesses budget more effectively
• Multiple report types provide point-in-time snapshots
• Forecasts comparisons; lets organizations compare financial statement reports

Best For: 

• Planful is an option for larger companies with FP&A teams that want to work more collaboratively within their business 

Planfuls Weaknesses:

• Collaboration can be complex as the individual models are not connected.
• Can be challenging to set up templates .
• Long loading times for data integration with large data sets.

How Does Planful Compare With Vena:

3. Anaplan

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.

Key Functionality and What Anaplan Does Well:

• Web-based application
• Aggregates data into a single source of truth
• Enables real-time collaboration with your team

Best For: 

• Anaplan is an option for larger enterprises with an extensive IT team to help support implementation

Anaplans Weaknesses:

• Difficult to build models if you dont have experience in multidimensional modeling
• Large data volumes lead to long load times with syntax errors which can become difficult to maintain
• Limited customization or flexibility options

How Does Anaplan Compare With Vena:

4. Prophix

Prophixs corporate performance management (CPM) 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.

Key Functionality and What Prophix Does Well:

• Allows resource forecasting based on defined user roles
• Flexible budgeting, scenario planning and reporting options 
• Provides insights, reports, analytics and process improvements

Best For: 

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.

Prophixs Weaknesses:

• Implementation can be a complicated process
• Some lack of industry standard functionality
• The software can be slow and struggles with data integration

How Does Prophix Compare With Vena:

5. Workday Adaptive Planning

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. 

Key Functionality and What Workday Adaptive Planning Does Well:

• Structured templates and reports
• Integrates with Workday HCM, Core Financials
• Strong brand recognition

Best For: 

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.

Workday Adaptive Plannings Weaknesses:

• Workforce planning not fully integrated with financial model
• Doesnt support financial consolidation
• Limited types of dashboards; difficult to modify

How Does Workday Adaptive Planning Compare With Vena:

6. Datarails

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.

Key Functionality and What Datarails Does Well:

• Ease of use
• Support for Google Sheets
• Low subscription price

Best For: 

Datarails is a solution for finance teams whose financial models are in Excel and want to maintain Excels familiarity and ease of use.

Datarails Weaknesses:

• Doesnt scale well
• Limited workflow and collaboration features
• No status tracking in audit trail

How Does Datarails Compare With Vena:

7. Cube

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.

Key Functionality and What Cube Does Well:

• Integration plugins for Excel and Google Sheets
• Security and controls of a cloud-based enterprise software
• Deployment time (<14 days) with minimal resources required

Best For: 

Cube is a solution for businesses that prioritize Google Sheets compatibility with data consolidation, flexible dashboards and reports.

Cubes Weaknesses:

• Doesnt scale well or support month-end close
• Lacks predictive planning (static scenario modeling)
• Limited workflow and collaboration features

How Does Cube Compare With Vena:

Conclusion

Your strategic financial functions are charged with delivering insights that accelerate company-wide, data-driven decision making. To enable these FP&A processessuch as workforce planning, cash flow planning and scenario planningyour finance team needs a budgeting and forecasting process that provides that data instantly and accurately.

Without budgets and forecastsbuilt from trusted dataat your stakeholders fingertips, your team cant enable your organizational leaders to plan your companys 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 adoptto build a winning budgeting and forecasting process.

Better Budgeting and Forecasting With Vena

Discover how Venas budgeting and forecasting software can take your planning cycle to the next level.