Centage Planning Maestro Review – 2023 Pricing, Features, Shortcomings

Product:
Vendor:
Founded:
Headquarters:

Planning Maestro
Centage
2002
Boston, MA

Ownership:
Customers:
Deployment Model:
Free Trial:

Private
10,000+
On-Premise
No

Planning Maestro At A Glance

Good: Allows businesses to transition from complex spreadsheets to intelligent software that builds and manipulates driver-based, collaborative budgets.

Bad: Because its mainly used for budgeting and planning, it does not include comprehensive accounting functionality.

Bottom Line: While this software has a limited focus, it succeeds at its goal: enabling faster and more accurate budgeting, forecasting, analytics and reporting than spreadsheets could offer.

Product Overview

Planning Maestro is a cloud-based intelligent planning, budgeting and forecasting solution that helps small and midmarket organizations make quicker and informed financial decisions. Users can build a complete budget, perform numerous what-if scenarios and more. The software has pre-programmed business logic and accounting rules to build and manage budget models more simply.

Planning Maestro helps users make driver-based, collaborative budgets and plans simple to build and manipulate through reports and dashboards that show both the current health of the business as well as automated forecasts.

Features

Planning Maestro focuses on budgeting, planning, forecasting, reporting and analysis. Some of its core features include:

Budgeting – This software allows users to build a fully complete and accurate budget that is accessible anytime, anywhere.
What-if scenarios – Users don’t have to code or program in order to change their budget models instantly. Planning Maestro allows for dynamic and infinite what-if scenarios.
Forecasts – Users can automatically generate an accurately forecasted balance sheet and cash flow statement based on any model or assumption.
Define it yourself – Planning Maestro allows users to define drivers, spread methods and mass assumptions for any model scenario for deeper customization.
Customized dashboards – Users can understand their data more simply and easily share it through customized financial dashboards with drill-down and slice-and-dice analysis capabilities.
Integration – Seamlessly integrate with a General Ledger to ease budget vs. actual analysis.
Multiple contributors – Allow numerous budget owners or contributors access in order to have one single source of data truth.
More than spreadsheets – Budget and report by customer, product, location, division, manager, channel and more. The budget models also include multi-entity balance sheets and cash flow reporting, multi-dimensions reporting with roll-ups, integrated income statement, and more.

Target Market

Planning Maestro is built for small- and mid-market companies of all industries. We’ve listed 10 of its clients below.

Alliance Tire
Bard Date
Brandeis University
Home Service Stores
Immune Design

Vermont Country Store
Risk Strategies
Hames Corporation
Wagner Asia Equipment LLC
SerenaGroup

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Implementation/Integration

Planning Maestro’s implementation methodology is a four-step process:

Discovery – This initiates JumpStart, a process that reviews existing goals, structure and constraints, including business objective identification, evaluation of current systems, and a review of best practices.
Configure – Configuration is accomplished with straightforward prompts, wizards and menus, bypassing the need for formulas or programming. This step includes accounts and financial reporting views, entities and operational reporting views, assumptions (including payable and receivable schedules, business drivers, expenses model and more), data transfers, and validation.
Educate – Planning Maestro consultants share tools and techniques through knowledge transfer, administrator training and a train-the-trainer technique.
Go Live – After a company starts using the software, the customer service team provides ongoing support and user feedback.

Planning Maestro integrates with Microsoft Dynamics 365, Sage ERP, SYSPRO ERP, and QuickBooks. It is also designed to work with any general ledger application.

Customer Service & Support

Centage offers a Support Portal that features a large knowledge base of articles as well as email and phone support.

Clients receive technical support only with an Annual Maintenance Services (AMS) Agreement, which is a yearly fee that’s 20% of their current license price. This service includes:

Live phone technical support
Support via email
Response time of 24 hours or less on most tickets
24/7 access to the online knowledge base
Immediate access to product updates and upgrades
Maintainance updates, hotfixes and patches
Full licensing and installation assistance
Invitation to participate in beta programs

Pricing

Centage does not publicly release its pricing information. Please contact the vendor directly for a quote.

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Shortcomings

Planning Maestro isn’t a full accounting solution. Instead, it intently focuses on budgeting, planning, forecasting, analytics and reporting.

Screenshots

About

Centage Corporation was founded in 2001 with the Budget Maestro family of solutions made to streamline budgeting, forecasting, financial consolidation, performance analysis, and reporting processes for small to medium-sized organizations.

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Planning Maestro Accounting Review