BudgetPak

Focused on the Budget Owner

Kommentare: Working with the XLerant team has been great. They were very patient with us in the decision process and have been very helpful in getting set up as well. Great team.

Vorteile:

BudgetPak was built with the end user (Budget Holder) in mind. The budget process is a simple step by step process made so that "non-finance" people can easily put their annual plan together. Then, as the finance team, you can use that data to run forecasts and long term projections as often as you need. There are also easy Excel integrations for the finance team to use to pull data or upload data directly to the cloud database.

Nachteile:

I haven't used the software for very long, but I am concerned about the "refresh" or initialization times. But it isn't something that would've pushed me away from the product per se as most other options I saw would require the same thing.

Easy to Use / Top-notch Support

Kommentare: Xlerant customer service and support are excellent. If any questions arise, we ask and they promptly respond. There is ongoing training offered in the form of a support site, webinars and newsletters. BudgetPak is robust and well-written. Our users are mostly non-financial people and they've found it easy to use. We made the right choice.

Vorteile:

The integration was seamless. The implementation team at Xlerant was organized, responsive, and knowledgable. The product is easy to use for both our admins and end-users. The product meets all of our needs: it's fully customizable and there are are several reporting options. Forecasting, and creating several budget scenarios is important to us. BudgetPak met those requirements too.

Nachteile:

Nothing to report here. I honestly can't think of any cons.

BudgetPak Beginner

Kommentare: I am attempting to have our College use BudgetPak in the place of budgeting with jut Excel.

Vorteile:

The choice of menus allows users to work with whatever best fits them.

Nachteile:

Terms unique to this software are not translated to the new user. If you are not the one who set up the software, the terms are undefined.

Incredibly useful for establishing dynamic & inclusive ("bottom up" budgeting process

Kommentare: Inclusive budgeting process and much enhanced ability to forecast and deliver needed reports.

Vorteile:

End user experience is easy and intuitive. I especially love the ability to establish monthly budgets which provides a much greater probability for accurate year-end forecasts. The numerous ad hoc reports and MyExcel features are also dynamic and incredibly useful.

Nachteile:

While Xlerant offers wonderful and ready customer service, we still found the installation process very time consuming and quite challenging. Also, you need a person dedicated to the continued administration of this software.

Cathy's review

Kommentare: We are a large property/casualty insurance company with 23 departments. Departments are more aware of what they are spending and are looking for ways to control their costs. End users have spoken very highly and favorably of the product. They are fully engaged and more accountable with their own budgets and feel more involved in the overall budgeting process for the company.

Vorteile:

BudgetPak is a cloud based software, user friendly and easy to use for the non-financial user.

Nachteile:

As Administrators, when you make changes in your company configuration, the Validation and Initialization process can take at least 1 hour or more to run. While this is happening, no other end users are able to see or work on their budgets since system is under maintenance.

BudgetPak is easy to implement and is very user friendly.

Kommentare: Get rid of those Excel workbooks and macros you currently use for budgeting. BudgetPak makes it easy to budget and forecast for any users. We went through a realign of our HQ office in early 2009. BudgetPak made it easy to make those changes quickly and consolidation was a snap with great audit trails.

Vorteile:

In 2008 our Company (at one of the Operating Group Headquarters location) was looking for a budgeting software tool to replace our Excel workbooks to prepare our annual budget and forecast. After considering 6 different budgeting software packages BudgetPak was the clear winner for the ease of implementation, but more importantly, how user friendly it is. You are not required to be a finance person to use it. During the initial demonstration I had various internal users (VP, Director, Manager) participate in addition to myself who is a Finance person with lots of software experience. I wanted my internal users to feel comfortable with BudgetPak and not to be intimidated. It was also their feedback that made the decision easy to select BudgetPak. For the features, performance, and robustness I am getting for BudgetPak and the price to implement and maintain it BudgetPak has the edge over its competitor.

Nachteile:

The vanilla canned reports that came with BudgetPak are good, but I would like to see more custom reports or more ways for me to build custom reports. I plan to work with BudgetPak to enhance reports in future version releases.

Phenomenal Budgeting and Financial Planning Software

Kommentare: BudgetPak is nice software to handle Budgeting and Financial Planning with the features they offers. we are using this tool to manage our budget and financial planning to produce more efficiency in very short time. It's a perfect tool for financial team of any company or organization to make effective solutions on budgeting.

Vorteile:

It's a easy to use automated budget tracking software that offers many powerful features to manage your budgeting and allows you to create your financial planning more effectively in very short time.

Nachteile:

I didn't face any issues with the features they provides but yes I feel that their is a limited functionality to manage your budget.

XLerant provides a fantastic software that has greatly improved our budgeting process.

Vorteile:

The customer support. Any time there is a question or concern, the XLerant team quickly responds and assists. When there were areas that the software seemed to be lacking, the support team would troubleshoot and came up with working solutions that improved the software greatly.

Nachteile:

From an administrator standpoint, the software is complicated. It has taken me a bit of time to learn all the options within it. In a way, this is a very positive thing as the system has many features useful to different clients. The only issue is that it becomes difficult to train new system administrators and to know that our institution is using the system to it's full effect.

Easy to set up and user friendly

Kommentare: We create 75+ budgets every year for our markets. We switched from an Excel only model. This system has allowed us to have greater visibility and run reports quickly. Whenever we have any questions or issues, customer service is quick to respond.

Vorteile:

BudgetPak is easy to implement. Only 2 of our 10 users are accounting professionals, everyone learned the system with no issues. The MyXL function allows us to pull budget details quickly for research or custom reports. Standard reports within BudgetPak are easy to use and allows us to quickly compare any of our budgets or actuals. We are very satisfied with the product and customer service.

Nachteile:

Unfortunately, we have some complicated travel calculations for budgeting that still have to be done out of the system. But we are able to attach our worksheets in BudgetPak for reference. This is not a huge issue for us.

Great Software for nonexcel users

Kommentare: The staff has been very helpful, understanding and responsive. They have found solutions for any situation we have brought to their attention, or have taken the suggestions to make future enhancements.

Vorteile:

Our end users have most liked that this software does not look like excel. It is user friendly. The ability to quickly and easily roll up the budgets will be a huge time saver.

Nachteile:

The software does not yet accommodate balance sheet budgeting.

Budgetpak is a powerful and easy to use budgeting tool

Kommentare: Strongly recommended. Provides us the functionality we require, coupled with a user experience that requires virtaully no training. A very solid product.

Vorteile:

Real-time rollups, version control, auditability, integrated headcount and capital budgeting. Simple and straightforward from an end-user standpoint, but the real benefit will be to your company's finance team responsible for the overall budgeting process. Easy to configure to your company's needs and powerful in that it always enables you to know where your end-users are in their process and provide real-time updates and snapshots to senior management.

Nachteile:

On-the-fly configuration changes often require a system "reinitialization" which requires the software be taken offline for a short period of time. Can be done off-hours, but in an international company with users all over the world, this can be inconvenient.

Meeting Goals with BudgetPak

Kommentare: The College takes a bottom up approach to developing the annual budget. Budget Managers are expected to develop a plan that establishes their Strategic Planning Goals and Objectives for the department that is linked to the College's plan then determine the expenses (and for some departments) revenue associated with achieving their plan. Excel and paper worksheets were unable to satisfy this basic requirement or our other long term goals of monthly budget details, periodic forecasting updates, and 5-year planning. BudgetPak has allowed us to document the line item requests and link them to department plans as well as establishing monthly budgets by line item. Budget Managers were surprised and delighted by the ease with which they were able to create, document and review their budgets as well as run reports which quickly compared their newest requests to prior budget or actual periods. The executives and I now spend our time making decisions based on quickly summarized data which is fully owned and supported by the Budget Managers.

BudgetPak

Kommentare: BudgetPak has made our process more collaborative. It has centralized all the data in one place with easy access.

Vorteile:

We have been able to keep all data in a centralized place and not in Excel. The ease of use for our end users.

Nachteile:

The standard reporting available. We have employed the Excel add-on to facilitate in what we need.

User friendly budgeting

Kommentare: This is an excellent product. We compared several budgeting software packages before selecting BudgetPak. We have 40 cost centers and almost 100 users. This software has made our budget process more transparent & more efficient. We could not be happier.

Vorteile:

BudgetPak is an easy to use, robust budgeting tool for organizations. *Budget users love it *Provides transparent payroll budgeting for the budgeting manager *Security provides different levels of access for users *Organization wide reports are easy to produce *Excellent visibility of comparative data - both budgets and actuals *Ability to spread budget based on several easy to use methodologies

Nachteile:

Wish they made more software products!

BudgetPak is robust AND easy to use

Kommentare: Very useful for all sizes of organizations. We examined all of the top Gartner-recommended products, and this was by far the easiest for our staff to understand and be proficient with.

Vorteile:

Even users challenged to use Excel understand BudgetPak Very easy from IT's perspective to install, maintain, and load updates Great for what-if scenarios Robust headcount management Multiple ways to budget - by month, by headcount, by monthly spreading, by percent increase or decrease, etc. Very useful and intuitive reporting Smooth interfaces to external sources and our GL system

Nachteile:

BudgetPak is unavailable when Accounting performs maintenance. Not any real problems!

Outstanding Product!!

Kommentare: Excellent product - you will not regret the purchase.

Vorteile:

BudgetPak is amazing, our organization with over 50 centers and 275 employees finds it "user friendly" and very intuitive. The reporting is versatile and exportable. The tech support area is prompt, helpful and answers even the smallest of questions with courtesy and professionalism. All tuitorials are detailed with screenshots and great directions. One of the best software purchases!!!

Nachteile:

Nothing comes to mind - any problems we have encountered have been dealt with promptly with detailed instructions.

Bunker Hill Review

Kommentare: I would recopmmend this product over any other product that claims to manage and develop the budget process. There is no comparison out there and this is hands down the best purchase I have made in my 11 years as Budget Director.

Vorteile:

Ease of use Intuitive approach More accurate budgeting More efficient process Improved communication Easy access to previous versions More accountability from managers Minimal internal IT resources needed (personnel) Excellent customer service

Nachteile:

I have nothing negative to say about this product.

General Administrator

Kommentare: Very good budgeting tool

Vorteile:

Ease of use for users. More visibility for department heads which leads to better decision making

Nachteile:

Limitations in forecast mode. A little complicated for administrator. Lacks instructional manual for administrator.

Addison Group Review

Kommentare: Creating spreadsheet budgets is not the best use of our finance team's time, but until we found BudgetPak, it was necessary. Our team was able to master the budget set-up tools in BudgetPak with very little training and with the XLerant product in place, we can now spend time focusing on higher value tasks. What we love about XLerant is it gives our managers the tools to transform their department-specific knowledge into a budget they can understand and own.

BudgetPak Review

Kommentare: I recommend BudgetPak as an affordable, easy to use replacement of Excel oriented budgeting.

Vorteile:

BudgetPak is an easy to implement, easy to use budgeting software. Department managers with little budgeting experience are walked through the budgeting process step by step, in a manner similar to Turbo Tax.

Nachteile:

Minor issues with headcount changes

Love that BudgetPak

Kommentare: I'm a user so I don't know about the back end, but the front end is great.

Vorteile:

We used a customized Access approach in the past that was terribly cumbersome and counter-intuitive. BudgetPak is just the opposite. This is our second year with it. I loved it from the start and still do.

Nachteile:

No cons to report

Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology

Kommentare: We wanted a system that not only could provide us with control over the budgeting process, but a system that could help us with forecasting the bottom line at the end of the year. Not only did BudgetPak meet those needs, we can now create a forecast in a few hours instead of a few days using Excel spreadsheets.

Very pleasant

Kommentare: BudgetPak meets our company's need for budgeting purposes.

Vorteile:

The software fits our company's need. The client service (Team) is very responsive. The communication portal (basecamp) is very convenient.

Nachteile:

The software BudgetPak is constantly upgraded with new functions and advanced reports, which well satisfies our company's need for budgeting.

BudgetPak is a great tool and the customer service and support is outstanding

Kommentare: The training video the BudgetPak staff provided for us was great and we had another successful budget cycle with BudgetPak! Once again we got great feedback from our users on the ease of use of the system.