Centage Planning Maestro Reviews

Planning Maestro is an excellent planning tool. It is easy to use, allows for long term budgeting and more frequent forecasting. Once the software is set up, it is relatively easy to maintain it. It has a lot of flexibility - budgeting with as much detail or as little as your organization requires. It integrates with several accounting packages so that actual information can be brought into PM with ease. Refreshable reports in Excel is a bonus.

mass updates are a bit more problematic as changes in information often result in duplicate records that have to be removed. There is no copy/paste function which existed in the prior version of the software

Producing a budget is simplified with Planning Maestro. With never ending categories, information can be updated year to year and serves as a good starting point for budgets yearly. We produce our budgets more quickly now in weeks instead of months.

Budget Maestro is easy to implement and configure to your needs. You can also change or improve your budgeting and forecasting model as things change or you decide to get more granular with your budgets.

I can't really think of anything I dislike. We have the web based version so it is cumbersome at times to save files on the web server and then copy them down to our server for emailing and sharing internally but I think this is where most software is going.

Centage Budget Maestro has allowed us to build our budgets in more detail than in the past and therefore we are able to change certain variables to see what the impact will be. We also can easily re-forecast the year periodically without much effort, just adjusting for changes in hires/terms and adjusting the drivers as necessary.

Software is logical to use and support excellent

would like a better module for asset financing

A good robust product that has the best support I have ever experienced from any software company

We have a robust budgeting and forecasting tool that is easy to update with an integrated balance sheet and cashflow that also allows us to automate financial reporting

Integration, collaboration, what if analysis, reporting . . . the list goes on. BM gives me the tools necessary to get the job done, fast & accurate. The integration of the tool allows me to keep in sync all budget changes with the GL. BM allows for multiple people at once to update budget figures and collaborate across the company. The built in "What If" tool creates fast accurate scenarios we can use when making critical decisions. Analytics Maestro brings the best of both worlds together by combining the reporting power of Excel and the database of information in BM.

BM has a built-in reporting tool, but I don't use it. It's another report tool I don't want to learn to use, and therefore I dislike it. Instead I use Analytics Maestro, which is more intuitive, and more powerful than most reporting tools out there.

Implementation is always a big unknown when looking at new software. BM was one of the best implementations I have ever been through. The BM Team was on top of what needed to occur and made sure they correctly heard and understood our needs. We started the process dangerously close to our budget season, but was ready to go on time, fully trained, and 2 years of prior data in the database for us to compare against. If you need a reliable budgeting & forecasting tool with a fantastic implementation team then Budget Maestro has what you need.

Speed & Accuracy, two words you don't associate with budgeting very often. With BM we are able to budget for a multi-million dollar company with multiple industry complexities in a way that we can rely on that data and not take forever to get it. We have cut our budget cycle time by over 50%, eliminated hours of data entry, and made our budgets and forecasts valuable to our company and stakeholders.

We have support departments allocate to our divisions and we use Budget Maestro allocations. Our support departments can do 'what if' scenarios and the division see the results immediately.

Our balance sheet and cash flow is too complicated to use Budget Maestro

Terms less that 30 days

What I like best about Planning Maestro is the proprietary nature of the software. It allows the user to cater financial reports based on the user of the financial information.

To get real-time data that ties back to your source ERP the integration must be perfect. The integration process can be challenging and cumbersome at first given the fact you may be new to using the software or it's your first time performing this task.

At my organization, we are using Planning Maestro to drive management by the numbers. We're realizing quick pivot forecasting methods to help our divisional managers drive performance from operations.

Ease of use and affordability. The ability to design your budget without having to pay someone to configure the software is inexpensive. Has all the features that small businesses need and their budget needs.Centage provides strong customerservice and was a great value for our organization.

We were still using an older version last I had checked and well there's one particular report that we like that could not duplicate the newer version to our satisfaction and the databse creates most mistakes for us. We shoudn't have had to resort to that.

It would be important for any organization to analyze its data and structure requirements before selecting a budgeting tool that best complements its data needs. Centage is one of the best in that regard but their dedicated support team needs to step it up in terms of allowing the same reports across all their versions.

Financial presentations and eliminationg of excel spreadsheets to a more dedicated software solution.

Budget Maestro really gives us control of the budgeting process and has actually help us move beyond budgeting and into longer range planning horizons with ease

Take a little getting used to but the support is excellent and will get you there !

Good Solution and an upgrade over excel based budget tools

We reduced the stress of the budget cycle and process and having a great tool helps build confidence in the planning process

The layout - it is easy to just click your way around and find what you're looking for. I use it to track the delivery of projects and the associated maintenance that goes with them. Easy to enter new records and update as the delivery date changes.

At first we set it up incorrectly and did not take advantage of the user training that Budget Maestro offered.

Use the support they provide when setting up Budget Maestro for the 1st time. We did not and went 6-7 months setting it up incorrectly on our own. We used the in office support and was able to set it up within a short period of time correctly. Also use the conference calls for support once you have it set up and are using it to help you along the way

The use of very large excel files for budgeting as well as large files when reporting monthly to other business users. Also wanted to get in all of our headcount, project and contracts into one database instead of many different excel files.

Great customer experience. Our company uses an older version, but we still have the ability to create new dimensions for Post Audit Adjustments, pro forma reporting, and any other measure we decide we would like to compare against.

Limited capabilities on older version so we only had 6 dimension capability. This was creating a challenge for our organization as we have over 300,000 rows of data per year to slice and dice.

The cloud based demo appears to be a strong product for the end user.

We use the product for our Annual Budget process for over 60 branches. We also use the product for daily retrievals of actuals to compare against our Budget to help gauge the strength of our individual offices across the organization.