Reviews - Alight Planning

I'm a new client and am very impressed with the value and flexibility of Alight Planning. As a nonprofit organization that does not provide a direct service, we're not the typical client that has a need for business modeling. However, what we do need that Alight Planning provides, is the ability to plan and track multiple grants, allocate wages and overhead, and roll up the various plans into consolidated and integrated financial statements. As our organization and revenue sources grew, the budget/forecast process and "what-if" analysis became too complex and too cumbersome to build using unwieldy spreadsheets. We still have much to learn about the capabilities and best use of Alight Planning in our organization, but we are confident it will be the foundation for all of our business planning needs, today and in the future. My only regret... I wish I had Alight Planning when I was the CFO in the printing, publishing, and manufacturing sectors.

I have been using Alight for several years. A gigantic spreadsheet "@ref" meltdown caused me to search for something better. Some important points: #1 - Customer service - second to none. I assume that Rand Heer has found some way to "program" all of the people at Alight because they ALL demonstrate the same great customer service approach #2 - Continuous improvement - new and seriously improved versions are always being rolled out. #3 - Intuitive customer interface - We can plan in exactly the way our users think about the business #4 - A stable platform - this year we are moving all of our planning, analysis and reporting to Alight. Our GL system data imports easily into Alight. Our old budget process was slow, inaccurate and very difficult for our users. (4 distinct business lines, 90+ locations, 1000 employees) #5 - Transition to self-sufficiency - Support is built with the end goal being the users looking after the models. No endless billable hours for programming changes. That's why I give them 5 stars

Alight Planning is more than a time-saver, it’s a tool that added value for me in two key areas. First, simply getting off of ExceI. In the Alight Planning model, I know the numbers are right, so I don’t spend time checking if formulas are working. Secondly, and even more importantly, the Alight Planning model enables me to quickly change scenarios. We get questions all the time, and I’m able to answer them quickly and accurately. As an example, we recently did some headcount sizing and analysis. I was able to do it very quickly with the unit-rate-driven model in Alight and go back in to add more granularity. Setting up driver-based models in Alight happens quickly. As with any system, there is a bit of a learning curve, but once you get the model set up, it’s a major value-add. I hope to expand my use of Alight in 2012 and highly recommend Alight to anyone looking to do rolling forecasts or set up a driver-based model to manage scenarios that help answer management questions quickly and accurately.

We were seeking a product to augment our primary accounting system for budget preparation, reporting and variance analysis. We researched the market and after a very thorough search found Alight. Rand and Ben responded to our initial request for information and set up a demo using fields and data that we provided. After the demo we saw that this uniquely positioned product was exactly what we were looking for. It gives us the level of detail we needed and the flexibility to budget and track at any level we want to. It's very hard to find such a robust product at such a low cost, definitely a 'best value' for our needs. The package is very intuitive right out of the box and the support is simply outstanding. Alight is also always seeking to improve their products and takes customer feedback seriously.

Our company is a new user of Alight Planning. We are a small business with 55 employees and have been using Excel in past years to build our annual budget. We also intend to build monthly operational reports for variance analysis by importing actuals from our accounting systm. So far, we have been very pleased with Alight's ease of use and flexibility. We are especially pleased with the quality of implementation assistance we have received from Alight's consultant, Lisa-Torbin Shaw. Lisa has guided us carefully through the process of building our budget module, yet allowed us to take over the reins at appropriate times, so that we would gain the knowledge necessary to maintain the system. I might also mention that pricing was extremely advantageous compared with similar budget systems.

Alight is a very powerful, quickly-implementable planning, forecasting, analytics package. If you are familiar with Pillar, it uses the same units * rates = amounts methodology. Once you set up the basic structure of dimensions and rollups, you can be up and running very quickly. As a former Pillar user, I had a basic plan built for our 28-person company within a week. The more I use it, and the more I learn about it - the more I like it. Building multiple scenarios within a single model is very quick and easy. There's a lot of flexibility in being able to build line items as a function of other line items or activity drivers. I was looking for a tool that resides on my desktop. I like being able to use it without logging in. There aren't any latency issues. And this may be more psychological than anything - but it feels like a more "solid" entry when I'm loading into a cell on my desktop vs. in the cloud. I have seen flakiness with respect to saving changes with SaaS models that I have not experienced with Alight since we bought it 5 months ago. On the slightly negative side - Alight is definitely more of a planning tool than a reporting tool. The formatting of reports looks nice on a screen. I like the beige and blue color scheme. But for formatting and printing....better off exporting to Excel. Also, creating Ad Hoc reports (there's a tab called "Ad Hoc" for doing queries) is limited to a small number of reports, and it's not the most intuitive reporting engine. But - you could say the same about most planning packages - unless you spend a lot more money with BI tools. I believe Alight sells a reporting add-on - but I'm not familiar with it - yet. In summary - I'm really happy with my choice of Alight. I'm giving it 5 stars as a planning/forecasting/multi-scenario software tool - and not dinging it for it's reporting weaknesses - which again, is common to most if not all planning packages in this price range.

I've been using Alight Planning since 2007 for my client base. While I use other financial models as well, Alight is easy to learn as it has a spreadsheet-like look and feel, but without all the frustrations. Models can be built in a fraction of the time compared to the spreadsheet alternative. My favorite feature of Alight is the use of casual analysis whereby variances from plan can be explained based on volume and/or price changes. There are other 'soft' benefits to Alight: -1- The team is Class-A. When I call, they listen and they take customer service seriously. -2- They have nailed the implementation model. They have a streamlined system for installs which keeps that part of the cost down. -3- Not many competitors do a prototype before the customer buys the product. Alight does. -4- Alight is as much about educating the world about driver-based modeling as they are selling software. I've provided many of their whitepapers to clients and peers. The other products I use similar to Alight are missing this critical intellectual capital. -5- Finally, this company updates their software regularly. A related competitor hasn't upgraded since December 2009. I don't care how good the product is, every tool has warts. Thankfully, Alight listens to their customer base, and they make changes accordingly. Great tool, great people behind the tool.

Alight has been a very solid tool for us. Our business model lends itself naturally to a driver based planning system. We've been using Alight for 2.5 years, and it has allowed us to be much more nimble in producing rolling forecasts, upside and downside scenarios, and yes, annual budgets. One example of a benefit we've reaped from the product was where an outside consultant asked our CEO what it would take to reach a huge stretch goal by 2014. All it took was a couple of hours of tweaking our main drivers to find the answer. With our system in place prior to Alight, this would have been a three day project.

As a past user of Alight Planning I would like to suggest that this is a very clean solution to your budgeting and forecasting needs. I implemented it at a $120M food company. It replaced an Access tool that we had been using and paying annual fees to update through a consultant. Alight has a driver based methodology. You get integrated P&L, BS and Cashflow statements. You make/change the assumptions (drivers) and the formulas you have created update the integrated statements instantly. The tools supports multi-location and multi-user requirements. You set up your chart of accounts and start planning. You cannot break the links between the statements. Yes, you can put in incorrect formulas or assumptions, but you cannot break the tie between the single statements. Very nice tool. I recommend it as an alternative to Hyperion and those inherent complexiites.