If you’re running a B2B or a SaaS business, you have to constantly make decisions without the luxury of clairvoyance, and uncertainty is an inevitable aspect of any B2B business.
That’s where financial forecasting software comes in. It can help you make informed decisions, mitigate risks, and optimize your financial performance for sustainable growth. This guide will discuss six top financial forecasting software tools with a detailed comparison of their features, capabilities, pros, and cons to help you select the best one for your unique requirements.
The goal of forecasting is not to predict the future but to tell you what you need to know to take meaningful action in the present
— Paul Saffo
The 6 best financial forecasting software tools compared
Financial planning and forecasting software helps FP&A teams make data-backed decisions regarding hiring, budgeting, predicting revenue, and strategic planning. We have handpicked the six best SaaS forecasting software tools and provide a side-by-side comparison based on their features and capabilities.
In this guide, we provide detailed discussions about the ways that financial forecasting software tools can benefit your business and the specific features you’ll want to look for. But first, let’s start by getting acquainted with your options. The table below gives you a summary with more detailed information on each tool to follow.
| Software/ Platform | Drivetrain | Vena | Cube | Mosaic | Workday Adaptive Planning | Anaplan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $$ | $$ | $$ | $$ | $$-$$$ | $$$ |
| Best for | SMB to Mid-Market | Mid-Market | SMB to Mid-Market; with custom pricing for enterprises | SMB to Mid-Market | Mid-Market | Enterprise |
| Scalability | High | High but requires extensive planning | Scalable, but requires manual uploading | Moderate | Scalable but requires continual adjustments | Scalable with upgrades |
| Type of FP&A solution | 3rd Generation | 2nd Generation | 3rd Generation | 3rd Generation | 2nd Generation | 2nd Generation |
| Native Integrations | 200+ OOTB integrations | Few native integrations | 22 OOTB integrations | 29 OOTB integrations | 7 OOTB integrations | 10 OOTB integrations |
| Predictive forecasting | ||||||
| Scenario planning & modeling | ||||||
| What-if analysis | ||||||
| Automated real-time financial statements & reports | ||||||
| Customizable forecasting models | ||||||
| Connected 3-statement modeling | ||||||
| Customizable modeling and reporting templates | ||||||
| Collaboration with access control | ||||||
| Dynamic dashboards | ||||||
| In-house implementation | Yes | unknown | unknown | unknown | No | No |
Drivetrain
$$
Small and Mid-market
200+ popular integrations with your ERP, CRM, HRIS, etc.
Customizable forecasting models
Automated and on-demand reporting
Best-in-class calculation engine with power to scale
Easy-to-use, self-service spreadsheet-inspired UI
Best-in-class visualizations and dashboards
Unparalleled customer support
Heavily focused on B2B and SaaS businesses
Predictive forecasting capabilities
Multi-dimensional modeling capabilities
Top-down and bottom up financial forecasting
Rolling budgets and forecasts
Connected 3-statement modeling
Scenario planning and what-if analysis
Multi-currency support
Our top pick is Drivetrain – one of the few planning and forecasting software solutions designed for B2B and SaaS businesses and their financial planning and analysis (FP&A) processes. Finance and non-finance teams can quickly create multi-dimensional models using Drivetrain’s intuitive user interface and plain English formulas, which are 10 times faster than building models from scratch.
Of course, there are plenty of customizable model templates built-in to help you get started, making it easy to construct and compare multiple scenarios to achieve more accurate forecasting.
Powerful yet simple to use, Drivetrain offers the full range of FP&A features finance teams need today, making it a complete planning and forecasting software.
Vena is a Microsoft Excel add-in that was developed mainly for Microsoft 365. It caters to medium to large businesses whose FP&A needs are more complex than they can easily manage with spreadsheets alone. Some specific capabilities of Vena include GP, reporting, compliance reporting, and financial close.
$$
Mid-market
Clean interface and easy-to-navigate menu options
Flexible forecasting capabilities
Data sharing via ad-hoc report builder
Limited cash flow modeling features
Requires tech support for integrations (including setting up templates)
Steep learning curve
Long implementation times
Expensive implementation and platform fees
Budgeting and forecasting
Performance metrics
What-if analysis
Rolling forecasts
Next on our list is a spreadsheet-native, cloud-based business forecasting software—Cube. This tool helps businesses and finance teams streamline financial forecasting, workflow management, and budgeting operations. Cube offers a number of integrations to make consolidating data for forecasting easier.
$$
Small to Mid-market
Native spreadsheet capability
No custom formulas are needed
Faster close and consolidation cycles
Complex ETLs, owing to a limited dimensional structure
Limited drill-down capabilities (summary-level only)
You need to restructure your data to fit into Cube’s system
Multidimensional analysis capabilities are limited to 8 top-line dimensions
Sharable planning templates
Bidirectional Excel and Google Sheets integration
Approval workflow
User-based controls
Centralized formulas and KPI
Mosaic provides some planning and modeling capabilities. However, it is more of a financial-BI tool than a comprehensive FP&A solution, with a number of integrations that help to consolidate and transform insights into accessible visuals.
$$
SMB to Mid-market
Easy-to-navigate UI
Analytical and modeling capabilities
Create custom metrics and reports
Model creation is rigid (highly inflexible) and highly templated
Limited number of integrations
Doesn’t support weekly reporting
Limited role-based access control
Steep learning curve with many different tabs, selections and fields to navigate and input values into
Budget creation and management
Customizable dashboard and templates
Data visualization and dynamic dashboards
Multiple scenarios
Workday Adaptive Planning is an enterprise performance management (EPM) tool, targeted to mid-market and enterprise-level businesses. Workday helps teams forecast the financial and operational outcomes of various production and demand conditions. While not purpose-built for SaaS, it includes forecasting features suitable for SaaS businesses.
$$-$$$
Mid-market to Enterprise
Interactive data visualizations
Offers custom integration support (for a fee)
Integrations limited to seven pre-configured adapters
Challenging to run reporting on one entity (only runs in consolidation)
Cumbersome implementation requires four months at a minimum and is often much longer
Expensive for smaller companies
Too many configurations lead to dependency on third-party systems integrators (SIs)
Scenario modeling
Zero and incremental budgeting
Comprehensive HR function for headcount planning
Anaplan is a corporate performance management (CPM) platform capable of most of the financial forecasting use cases that SaaS businesses require. It is most suitable for enterprise-level businesses with complex needs. Although not purpose-built for SaaS, it is designed to facilitate connected business budgeting and planning.
$$$
Enterprise
Connected planning
Scalable (with upgrades)
Good customization capabilities
Limited number of native integrations
Long implementation times (usually 6 months or more)
Steep learning curve
Limited dashboard capabilities
Complex pricing model; very expensive for small- to mid-sized businesses
Ad-hoc reporting
Dashboards and scorecards for KPI monitoring and benchmarking
What-if scenario modeling
Why Drivetrain is the best financial forecasting software
The solutions we cover here come from a combination of progressive, innovative software startups and prominent, traditional enterprise software vendors. They all differ in their approach to providing financial forecasting and other FP&A capabilities B2B and SaaS companies need today. However, Drivetrain stands out as a hybrid solution that combines the best of both worlds.
Drivetrain is purpose-built for strategic finance, offering all the features SaaS and B2B businesses need to fully support their FP&A now and in the future.
For businesses that need to scale quickly, Drivetrain offers the agility and ease of use of simple software while also providing the high-end capabilities of an enterprise solution.
Of course, performance is a key concern when choosing a solution that will scale with your business. You don’t need to worry about that with Drivetrain, though. With a powerful calculation engine under the hood, Drivetrain is capable of handling increasing workloads with ease.
The platform itself is also very easy to use. Ideal for both FP&A and non-finance teams, Drivetrain’s spreadsheet-inspired UI combined with plain-English formulas makes your data business-ready and accessible to all stakeholders so they can directly perform the different types of analysis they need to quickly reveal new insights.
With Drivetrain, you can be confident that you are getting the best financial projections software to help you streamline your financial processes, make better decisions, and achieve your business objectives—faster.
Make confident business decisions with Drivetrain’s financial forecasting software
How to choose the right financial forecasting software for your business
What is a financial forecasting software?
Financial forecasting tools help businesses analyze past business performance, current business trends, and other relevant factors to make accurate financial forecasts. With financial forecasting software, CFOs can model future outcomes quickly and make more informed decisions on how to improve it.
5 key benefits of planning and forecasting software
Shrinking runways, inaccurate forecasts, and inflexible budgeting can be disastrous for any business. Financial forecasting solutions can help companies to overcome these challenges and offer a host of benefits. Here’s a rundown of the benefits you can expect to see when you invest in a well-built financial forecasting tool for your business.
Automates business planning
A key benefit of using financial projections software is its automation. Automating data consolidation, offering on-demand reports, creating rolling budgets, and other functions significantly reduces the time it takes to get the job done. With more time to focus on important and strategic tasks, CFOs and finance teams can surface deeply hidden insights to make more informed, data-driven business decisions.
Navigate uncertainty with more confidence
A business forecasting software allows you to leverage scenario planning. You can create multiple scenarios (best-case or worst-case) and conduct root cause analysis to understand slowdowns in growth or identify bottlenecks. This enables you to be better prepared with contingencies when new threats and opportunities arise and the agility to respond quickly with confidence.
Faster alignment across teams
Financial forecasting software tools offer a unified system that provides a single source of truth for the entire organization. With all data accessible to all teams, it becomes easier to plan collaboratively. This visibility enables teams to understand better and accept the rationale behind different projections and decisions, fostering better and faster alignment.
Better Accuracy
When using spreadsheets for forecasting, the predicted values can differ significantly from the actual values, which is often the result of errors and/or versioning problems. These are just a couple of reasons why planning on Excel isn’t advised for B2B and SaaS businesses. Financial forecasting software eliminates these and other spreadsheet-related issues to help businesses make more accurate predictions and make better decisions as a result.
More time to do high-value work that drives business forward
The best financial forecasting software frees up your time on low-value tasks. It allows you to focus more time on simulations that prepare the business for the future and increase business agility and adaptability.
What are the different types of financial planning tools in SaaS?
Financial forecasting methods typically involve the use of large, complex, and interconnected offline spreadsheets. FP&A teams (more than any other function) have traditionally relied heavily on Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets for this purpose.
However, large and complex spreadsheets are a challenge even for people using them in everyday routines. They require a very long cycle for consolidation, and manually manipulating data in spreadsheets offers little time for modeling, simulations, and analysis—where the talent of finance managers is most needed.
The intense back-and-forth involved in verifying the data in spreadsheets – checking the version of each one to make sure it’s the most current and reviewing all the formulas – in addition to the time required to consolidate all the changes from each spreadsheet owner makes for a pretty a brutal workload for everyone involved.
Suffice to say that while spreadsheets are an excellent tool for very small startups with simple business models, they definitely are not designed to support businesses that need to scale. For all but the smallest companies, it’s pretty clear that FP&A teams need to abandon spreadsheets and move to robust financial forecasting software like Drivetrain to forecast at the speed and dimensionality of their business. When you make this kind of an investment, you’ll begin to see the returns immediately.
We’ve been able to go deeper into our data much faster than before and generate those insights. Drivetrain also provided an easy way to make accurate reporting accessible to the entire organization.
- Whatfix
| Software/ Platform | Drivetrain | Vena | Cube | Mosaic | Workday Adaptive Planning | Anaplan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Web application that replaces spreadsheets | ||||||
| Web application that integrates with spreadsheets | ||||||
| Application uses a spreadsheet for calculations | ||||||
| Add-in for spreadsheet applications |
Adapted from FP&A software classifications developed by Paul Barnhurst (The FP&A Guy).
Real-world use cases for financial forecasting software like Drivetrain
An accurate sales forecast is a foundation that drives many other business decisions. However, the major challenges in financial forecasting happen due to data silos and manual processes. Whatfix, an interactive digital adoption platform, faced similar issues until they partnered with Drivetrain.
The Whatfix finance team struggled with consolidating ERP and CRM data and manual month-end consolidation. This left them with limited time for forward-looking financial forecasting and analysis.
Even if we standardized a spreadsheet template, department heads would input their budget numbers and team costs, and send us different Excel versions of that. It was difficult to track, and sometimes they would change the assumptions or formulas. It caused a lot of frustration.
- Amit Sharma, Whatfix Senior Director, Finance
Drivetrain emerged as the best solution for Whatfix, helping the company integrate its financial data from Oracle NetSuite with its revenue metrics from Salesforce. This integration streamlined the analysis process, providing a single source of truth providing consistent metrics across various datasets. Also, automating consolidation and centralizing actuals in real-time eliminated the manual work for creating variance reports.
The impact was substantial, with Drivetrain reducing Whatfix’s reporting cycle from seven days after month-end close to just one day. The tool empowered department heads with a familiar Excel-like interface, enabling autonomy in budgeting and variance reports. This, in turn, increased accountability and alignment across the organization, allowing for meaningful discussions around financial performance and future strategy.
Drivetrain’s seamless integration into various departments, such as RevOps, sales, customer success, HR, and marketing, ensured everyone had access to the data needed to make informed decisions.
Now, Drivetrain helps Whatfix build forecasts that eliminate manual error and better prepare for the different business scenarios the company may face in the future.
A deep dive into the key features to look for in financial forecasting software
1. Native integrations
Integrations are an integral feature of any financial planning software. In financial forecasting, you must connect to multiple data sources, such as ERP, accounting, invoicing, HRIS, CRM, and more, to extract historical data and data about current and future market demands. This capability to connect to each source system is essential for the organization to base decisions on everything known both inside and outside of the organization. Your chosen forecasting tool should allow you to centralize your master data and transaction data from source systems.
| Software/ Platform | Drivetrain | Vena | Cube | Mosaic | Workday Adaptive Planning | Anaplan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Native integrations with top 6 ERPs | ||||||
| Native integrations with top CRM, HRIS, Billing & BI tools | ||||||
| Integration with Excel and Google Sheets | ||||||
| Excel/CSV upload download |
2.Predictive forecasting
State-of-the-art predictive forecasting capabilities are a must-have in your forecasting platform because they provide real-time access to historical data and support multi-dimensional forecasting methods to help businesses generate more accurate forecasts of future revenues, expenses, and cash flows. Moreover, it enables you to make more data-driven decisions regarding resource allocations in the short term as well as long-term strategic planning
| Software/ Platform | Drivetrain | Vena | Cube | Mosaic | Workday Adaptive Planning | Anaplan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rolling forecast | ||||||
| Driver based forecasting | ||||||
| Pre-configured forecast methods | unknown |
3. Multiple scenarios & what-if analysis
Scenario planning is a crucial aspect of forecasting as it helps you to prepare for multiple potential future outcomes. It enables you to hedge against the worst-case scenarios by providing predictions for uncertain events. Your financial forecasting tool should allow you to effortlessly build and test multiple scenarios and forecast for period-related fluctuations, such as seasonality and intermittent demand.
| Software/ Platform | Drivetrain | Vena | Cube | Mosaic | Workday Adaptive Planning | Anaplan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sensitivity analysis | unknown | |||||
| What-if analysis | ||||||
| Unlimited scenarios |
4. Multi-dimensional modeling
A financial forecast requires you to factor in a lot of moving parts and several variables that go beyond financial figures. To achieve an accurate forecast, you need a financial modeling software that allows you to customize inputs and calculations, make manual adjustments, support flexibility in creating budgets (see zero budgeting software) and test various scenarios. You should also be able to create multi-dimensional financial models, reports, and dashboards—all at the speed and dimensionality of your business operations.
| Software/ Platform | Drivetrain | Vena | Cube | Mosaic | Workday Adaptive Planning | Anaplan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| In-memory multi-dimensional calculation engine | ||||||
| In-memory multi-dimensional calculation engine | ||||||
| Unlimited planning window for long-range planning | ||||||
| Connected 3-statement modeling | ||||||
| Driver based forecasting | ||||||
| Rolling forecasts | ||||||
| Customizable model templates |
5. Automated reporting & dynamic dashboards
The best financial forecasting software should be able to provide you with the reports you need on the fly. Additionally, it should be able to display forecasts in interactive charts, graphs, dashboards, and reports. Dashboards, of course, offer visual clarity and communicate far more effectively than presenting results in a table packed with numbers. So, look for a solution that offers dynamic dashboards that enables stakeholders to create powerful narratives behind the numbers and also interact with and explore the data they’re looking at.
| Software/ Platform | Drivetrain | Vena | Cube | Mosaic | Workday Adaptive Planning | Anaplan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Drill down to transaction-level | ||||||
| Drill down by any dimension | ||||||
| Global- and chart-level filters | ||||||
| Automated 3-way financial statements | ||||||
| Text callouts/notes in dashboards | ||||||
| Reporting templates |
6. Collaboration with access control
Financial forecasting is an iterative process requiring collaboration and regular evaluation by various departments. Everyone involved should be able to operate, communicate and manage everything through a single platform—removing the need for sequential operations. It should provide teams of interest with alerts and notifications on all data changes and exceptions to ensure users never miss a critical update.
Another thing to keep in mind is how different users can collaborate. While some vendors offer commenting threads within the application, granular role-based access is necessary to keep up with the communication.
| Software/ Platform | Drivetrain | Vena | Cube | Mosaic | Workday Adaptive Planning | Anaplan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Commenting threads | ||||||
| Fine-grained role-based access control | ||||||
| Slack modifications (approved Slack app) |
7. Onboarding, training & customer success
Longer implementations and delayed onboardings reduce time to value and thus impact the ROI. Your chosen financial forecasting software should help all departments learn and adopt the software quickly and leverage it to its full potential. Look for software that preferably has an in-house implementation team. Third-party implementation can potentially introduce delays in achieving time to value. Other features to look out for include interactive walkthroughs, self-service support, and quick customer service.
| Software/ Platform | Drivetrain | Vena | Cube | Mosaic | Workday Adaptive Planning | Anaplan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Implementation time | 4-6 weeks | > 2 months | >2 months | >2 months | > 4 months | > 6 months |
| In-house implementation | Yes | No | unknown | unknown | No | No |
| White-glove onboarding | ||||||
| Self-service management (admin) | ||||||
| Dedicated customer support/success |
FAQ
1. What is the best tool for financial forecasting?
Of the many tools we have reviewed, we have found the following six financial forecasting solutions to be provide the best options for B2B companies in 2024:
- Drivetrain
- Vena
- Cube
- Mosaic
- Workday Adaptive Planning
- Anaplan
2. What is budgeting and forecasting software?
Budgeting and forecasting software helps organizations create, monitor, and track their budgets and financial forecasts. These tools aim to enhance an organization’s accuracy, efficiency, and collaboration.
3. How do you create a financial forecast?
There are essentially four main steps to creating a financial forecast.
- Gather your past financial statements
- Choose a method for your financial forecast
- Analyze financial data
- Create financial statements
While you’re looking for the best financial forecasting software solution for your business, you can getted started quickly with a good template for financial forecasting , which will streamline the process for you. Or you can schedule a demo of Drivetrain to see how to better predict your company’s future performance today.
