Before we dive into the details, here’s a quick glance at some of the best financial forecasting software available today:
Forecasting, financial planning, and budgeting involve planning for future business outcomes, and teams often use them together. However, they differ in key areas:
The budget serves as the baseline against which companies measure their performance, while the forecast estimates future performance (which they measure against the budget) and the financial plan.
This difference in purpose is what separates budgeting software from forecasting software. Budgeting software helps businesses create and manage various budgets and track expenses against predefined limits. It offers features like resource allocation, revenue and expense variance analysis, and approval workflows for budget proposals and revisions.
Forecasting software predicts future financial performance with features like scenario modeling, predictive forecasting, what-if analytics, and risk management tools.
Financial planning software offers budgeting and forecasting capabilities, enabling businesses to manage their finances on a single platform.
Forecasting tools assist businesses in estimating changes in business activity and thereby aiding decision-making. Several forecasting tools exist, each serving a different function. These tools include:
FP&A teams have traditionally relied on large, complex, and interconnected offline spreadsheets to develop financial forecasts. No other business function depends more on Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets than FP&A. However, using spreadsheets without a centralized database poses challenges.
Modern, cloud-first, and highly powerful solutions now help FP&A teams perform financial forecasts better, faster, easier, and more confidently. Here are the benefits of using financial forecasting software:
How much time do you spend manually entering data, creating complex spreadsheets, and updating your rolling forecasts? According to Asana, most people spend 157 hours yearly on manual recurring tasks.
You could direct that time to actual decision-making.
Without a single source of truth or centralized database, spreadsheets require constant checking of numbers, formulas, cell references, and more.
Forecasting software automates most of this work by connecting all data sources to a single platform with spreadsheet templates and built-in tools for maintaining rolling forecasts.
Forecasting software streamlines your decision-making process and improves the quality of your business decisions. How?
You can analyze larger and more complex data sets than with spreadsheets. Handling more data reduces assumptions and creates forecasts based on proven insights.
The software helps you visualize and model scenarios based on your forecasts. You can compare outcomes of multiple scenarios, test the feasibility of forecasts, and choose the best outcome for the business.
Financial forecasting software helps FP&A teams create financial forecasts.
Here's a few features to look out for in the best financial forecasting software:
Most importantly, the software should integrate with other business tools you use, such as your CRM, accounting software, payroll software, and more.
These are the top financial forecasting software providers, with crucial details on their features, benefits, targets, and more, all evaluated through an FP&A lens.
Cube is a cloud-based FP&A platform that helps companies hit their numbers without having to sacrifice their spreadsheets. Cube helps your finance team work anywhere by natively integrating with Excel and Google Sheets so FP&A teams can plan, analyze, and collaborate with ultimate speed and confidence.
Many high-growth companies, like Instride and Figment, use Cube for their FP&A needs, including projects that require coordination across various teams like reporting and budgeting.
Cube’s AI tool eliminates the inefficiencies and complexities often associated with traditional FP&A tools. The platform allows users to connect their existing enterprise resource planning (ERP), human resource information system (HRIS), and customer relationship management (CRM) systems directly to Excel and Google Sheets, providing a single source of truth for all financial data.
FP&A teams already know and love spreadsheets. Cube simplifies many of the headaches of the often challenging planning process—like collecting actuals from other departments or checking and verifying that your numbers are correct—and lets teams turn their complicated budgeting process into a lean operation. Users get all the benefits of a robust FP&A tool (like scenario analysis, data consolidation, and multi-currency support) within Excel and Google Sheets.
Key features:
Cube features translate to easier financial reporting and KPI management, more accurate forecasting and budgeting, faster close and consolidation cycles, and collaborative teamwork for more control and fewer mistakes.
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It’s not for individual business owners: Cube works best for mid-sized or enterprise businesses.
Pricing:
Cube starts at $2,000/month. See detailed pricing for customizable plans.
Best for: Cube’s simple and intuitive experience makes it an excellent choice for mid-market companies that want to start fast with scalable, enterprise-grade technology at a reasonable price.
Want to give Cube a try?
Workday Adaptive Planning, formerly called Adaptive Insights, provides enterprise solutions for planning, modeling, budgeting, and forecasting for the financial workforce.
Workday Adaptive Planning for Finance provides large enterprises with explicit financial planning and analytics. Their FP&A solution adds modeling, collaboration, analytics, financial management, board reporting, scenario planning, and financial consolidation capabilities. It also supports integration with other back end enterprise solutions like ERPs.
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Pricing: Pricing is not available on their website, but sources report packages starting at $250/month
Best for: Their strong capabilities outside of finance and FP&A make Adaptive Planning a good choice for large enterprises seeking a transformational, company-wide FP&A solution.
Anaplan supports scenario planning, forecasting, and decision-making. Their enterprise-wide solutions connect strategy to outcomes with accountability to a single truth source.
Anaplan specifically provides FP&A solutions to connect people, data, and plans across the organization to get the right decisions.
The solution includes planning, budgeting, and forecasting; specialty finance planning; operational planning, which delivers better and faster decision-making; automated cost management practices; and connected financial and operational plans.
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Pricing: Pricing for the Anaplan platform is not available online. The platform offers three tiers- Basic, Professional, and Enterprise. Sites report that entry-level pricing starts from $30,000 to $50,000 annually.
Also read: Anaplan vs. Adaptive vs. Planful vs. Vena vs. Datarails vs. Cube
Best for: Anaplan works for large enterprises with strong IT teams that can lead an enterprise-scale business transformation.
Planful offers a cloud-based budgeting software platform covering structured and dynamic planning, consolidation, and reporting. In early 2020, the company rebranded from Host Analytics to focus on mid-market customers.
For FP&A, Planful offers solutions for managing cash flow, workforce reporting, financial reporting, annual operating planning, monthly close and consolidation, and multi-dimensional analysis.
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Pricing: Planful doesn’t list pricing on their website, but users report the platform to be more expensive than others.
Best for: Planful works for companies with large FP&A teams that want to collaborate more with the business.
Vena Solutions offers a planning platform designed to bring people, processes, and systems together with pre-built solutions to automate time-consuming tasks.
Specific capabilities include financial planning and analysis, reporting, compliance reporting, and financial close. The platform enables finance teams to do variance analysis, identify discrepancies, and build ad hoc reports for the business.
Vena offers “pre-configured” FP&A software for a prescriptive approach that you can then customize.
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Pricing: Vena doesn’t list the price on its website; user feedback implies the cost is on the high side.
Best for: Vena works for companies that need the rigid process and planning controls of pre-built FP&A processes or want to customize a pre-built solution for their unique needs.
Prophix sells a corporate performance management (CPM) solution designed to improve profitability and minimize risk by automating repetitive tasks.
The solutions help finance teams forecast, plan, and report with cloud or on-premise solutions. Users can keep all their processes and insights on one platform and use centralized capabilities like user management, workflow, and data integration.
Prophix also has an AI-powered virtual financial analyst that helps users identify and resolve human errors while forecasting.
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Pricing: Prophix’s pricing isn’t available online, but users report it is affordable.
Best for: Prophix works for automating slow, manual, repeatable FP&A processes using pre-built functionality.
Jirav offers financial planning and analysis in the cloud, helping accounting and finance teams budget and forecast without relying on error-prone spreadsheets.
It’s also customizable so you can track, forecast, and share the data that matters most to your business.
The platform has separate solutions for accounting and CFO firms and small businesses, but it's better suited for smaller organizations that want to scale.
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Best for: Jirav is for small businesses that want to automate their financial processes by replacing spreadsheets with a simple tool.
Datarails offers financial reporting, data consolidation, scenario analysis, and ERP-Excel connectivity.
Their financial management platform empowers finance professionals to collect, report, and analyze data easily. Its FinanceOS enables users to keep building forecasts in Excel with more functionality.
Without changing how you work, Datarails creates a unified database of all your numbers by automating data collection from your organizational systems and spreadsheets.
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Pricing: Datarails pricing is unavailable on their website or other review websites.
Best for: Datarails works for smaller companies that run financial processes and financial forecasts on Excel but have trouble finding and organizing data across spreadsheets.
Centage’s Planning Maestro helps users build flexible, driver-based plans, forecast likely financial performance, analyze results, and share critical information across the business.
Finance teams can keep track of assumptions made when forecasting and automatically adjust assumptions with real time data to make better decisions.
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Pricing: Centage has three pricing tiers: Standard, Professional, and Enterprise. Prices aren’t listed on their website, but sources say plans start at $10,000 annually.
Best for: Planning Maestro suits FP&A at small businesses looking to drop spreadsheets and enable more complex financial processes. Their solutions target specific industries, such as architecture, engineering and construction, education, and nonprofits.
LivePlan is a business planning system that helps startups, enterprises, or businesses in the ideation stage to create forecasts for financial statements investors want to see. It includes an AI assistant tool to generate ideas for plans and access sample plans for their industry.
LivePlan provides guidance from business planning experts through webinars, walkthrough videos, and tutorials. The platform integrates with accounting software like QuickBooks and Xero.
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Best for: LivePlan works for individuals with a new business idea and startups looking to create fundable business plans.
Budgyt is a clean, simple platform for budgeting multiple P&Ls without needing Excel. It helps finance teams organize cluttered formulas and reduce the number of formulas used in financial forecasts.
This cloud-based, multi-department budgeting tool delivers solutions for small and medium-sized businesses, nonprofits, and larger enterprises.
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Pricing: Pricing is not available on the website or other online sources.
Best for: Budgyt works for small businesses, non profit, and larger enterprises with cost allocation needs.
Oracle Essbase allows organizations to rapidly generate insights from multidimensional data sets using what-if analysis and data visualization tools. It’s a business analytics solution that can complement other FP&A tools with deeper analytics and modeling capabilities.
The platform has sandboxing capabilities that enable businesses to test models and determine which ones are appropriate for production. It also has a REST API to automate the management of Essbase tools.
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Pricing: Pricing details are unavailable online.
Best for: Oracle Essbase is best for extensive Oracle organizations seeking an analytics and modeling solution.
Oracle Hyperion Planning is part of Oracle’s broader enterprise business planning solutions. It combines financial and operational processes to increase business predictability.
Its capabilities for planning, budgeting, and forecasting align financial plans, models, and forecasts across departments, cost centers, and lines of business.
Oracle Hyperion Planning supports robust integrations and workflow capabilities and is available on desktop, mobile, and Microsoft Office interfaces.
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Pricing: Pricing is unavailable online.
Best for: Oracle Hyperion Planning serves large organizations seeking an enterprise-grade performance planning management solution integrated with other Oracle solutions.
14. Oracle PBCS
Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS) offers operational planning with flexibility, scalability, transparency, and control.
Their software solution uses built-in best corporate finance practices through a configuration framework that you can use as-is or customize for unique needs.
The software allows users to connect every part of their business with an integrated plan across finance, operations, and other lines of business.
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Pricing: Pricing is not available online.
Best for: Oracle PBCS suits large enterprises that combine financial and operational planning and have existing investments in Oracle solutions.
NetSuite Planning and Budgeting, an enterprise resource management (ERP) tool, offers planning and integrated accounting software.
Users can automate planning and budgeting processes and centralize financial and operational data for companies in specific industries.
FP&A teams quickly and easily create budgets, financial forecasts, what-if scenarios, and reports within one tool. However, more robust demand planners might combine NetSuite with a dedicated financial forecasting tool on this list.
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Pricing: Pricing is not available on the website or other online sources.
Best for: NetSuite Planning and Budgeting serves large companies in specific industries that already use NetSuite solutions.
IBM Planning Analytics with Watson streamlines and integrates financial and operational planning across the enterprise.
More than just budgeting and forecasting software, the platform uses Watson AI to power your financial forecasting or demand planning process.
Users can analyze fine-grained and large-scale what-if scenarios in real-time. It provides built-in AI capabilities for teams to forecast business outcomes with greater accuracy.
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Best for: IBM planning analytics is best for enterprises already using other IBM solutions.
Cloud Zero is a cloud-based cost intelligence platform that enables businesses to optimize spending and identify savings opportunities.
Its solutions help users forecast and track the cost of business operations lines, like projects, apps, teams, and features. It integrates with cloud platforms including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and MongoDB.
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Pricing: Pricing is not available online.
Best for: Cloud Zero suits more technical organizations focused on cost optimization and cost savings.
Baremetrics Forecast+ helps SaaS companies perform end-to-end forecasting for their subscription business. It uses a three-statement financial forecasting model. The platform integrates with Xero and QuickBooks, automatically consolidating monthly data and enabling users to generate charts and dashboards in a few clicks.
Baremetrics also supports hiring planning by forecasting current and future employee needs and HR costs.
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Pricing: Pricing details are not available online.
Best for: Baremetrics suits SaaS companies with subscription businesses.
Liveflow is a financial forecasting tool that streamlines data integration and automation for better financial management. It enables users to automate repetitive finance and accounting tasks, report generation for clients, and data consolidation.
The platform offers spreadsheet integration capabilities that allow businesses to connect accounting software like Quickbooks to Google Sheets or Excel and sync reports in real-time or create interactive dashboards.
Liveflow has customizable templates for budget vs actuals, consolidation, vendor spend, board reporting, and 13-week cash flow forecast. The software also has a benchmarking tool for tracking performance across multiple business units.
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Pricing: Liveflow offers a custom pricing plan plus a one-time implementation fee of $2,500.
Best for: Liveflow is ideal for medium to enterprise level businesses that need real-time financial insights and automated forecasting solutions.
OneStream is a financial software solution built specifically for enterprises that need robust financial consolidation and reporting. It provides a unified platform that streamlines budgeting, forecasting, and financial analysis.
The platform enables businesses to reduce overhead through cash management, key performance indicator (KPI) tracking, and bank reconciliation. It integrates with Microsoft Office Suite so users can perform advanced analytics with Excel and other tools.
Onestream has inbuilt artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities that enable businesses to automate some manual FP&A processes, automatically generate insights from data, and increase forecasting accuracy.
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Pricing: Pricing is not available on the Onestream website and online sources.
Best for: OneStream works for large corporations that need a comprehensive tool for financial management, forecasting, and reporting.
Board is a financial forecasting and analytics tool designed to support data-driven decision-making for businesses. By combining robust analytics with customizable forecasting models, the Board enables finance teams to visualize and manage financial data effectively.
The platform supports enterprise-level planning and offers AI-powered financial and operational planning, a 360-degree view of internal and external business data, and enterprise-wide collaboration capability for users to share real-time insights across departments.
Board has a user interface tailored for different roles and supports low/no code development for businesses to build custom solutions. It also provides cloud infrastructure hosted on Microsoft Azure.
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Pricing: Board offers custom pricing for multiple functions including finance, supply chain, retail, sales, HR, predictive analytics, premium support, and integrations.
Best for: Board is ideal for businesses that need advanced analytics and high-quality visualization tools to enhance their financial planning.
Determining historical and current financial performance requires FP&A to gather organizational data from the past several years or quarters, depending upon the cyclicality and seasonality of a particular business or sector.
Estimates of future performance, however, vary widely by company and sector. There are several methods of financial forecasting:
Suppose your business operates in a stable industry and has experienced a 3% increase in revenue per quarter for the past several years. You can assume a similar growth rate going forward, barring any economic chaos.
This method is a “straight-line forecast” and is relatively simple. Your FP&A team assumes the organization will continue growing in a straight line.
However, straight-line forecasting is more complex in practice.
New products entering markets, economic uncertainty, pandemics, internal decisions, headcount changes, executive movements, and other factors impact financial forecasts. Your FP&A team must deal with a lot of data.
You need to account for all these factors. Even when using straight-line forecasting, your FP&A team needs a financial software tool or solution to assist.
If your business relies on historical data to develop financial forecasts, moving average financial forecasting incorporates more data and statistics into its projections.
A moving average uses data from several prior periods to estimate the next period’s results. By averaging over an extended series of periods, it reduces the impact of anomalies, one-time changes, or other fleeting factors affecting future forecasts.
While moving average financial forecasting uses straightforward averaging, it can quickly become complex as FP&A teams forecast more granular details beyond just revenue or profits.
Equip your FP&A team with a modern tool for financial forecasting if your organization has complex product lines, multiple regions, and other factors.
If you operate in a sector or industry with less predictable financial results, your FP&A team may choose to employ a time series method of financial forecasting.
Time series forecasting is particularly helpful for industries that experience cyclical or seasonal changes, such as winter sports apparel companies or lawn mower manufacturers.
This method benefits organizations that frequently experience market, competitive, or other changes and cannot rely on years of historical data. In these cases, FP&A teams may limit historical data usage to only recent months or quarters.
Time series financial forecasting typically requires more computing power than standard straight-line forecasting.
However, this method aims to accurately estimate similarly cyclical, seasonal, or fast-changing financial results in the short term.
When using time series financial forecasting, your FP&A team will benefit from the help of a modern, capable FP&A software tool.
Linear regression models the relationship between a dependent variable (the influenced variable) and an independent variable (the influencer).
This method of financial forecasting will help you see the effect on profits, for example, based on taking an action, say adding additional sales reps.
Financial forecasting using more complex linear regression may consider many dependent and independent variables to determine how those factors affect future financial performance.
Your FP&A team can use linear regression financial forecasting to create forecasting models based on differing assumptions to focus on a final likely forecast. But, as the number of assumptions and variables increases, these forecasts quickly become complex.
Employing linear regression financial forecasting with spreadsheets can quickly add undue confusion, complexity, and manual effort, requiring FP&A teams to find a dedicated financial forecasting solution.
Read our guide to cash forecasting for SaaS companies.
|
Technique |
Use |
Data needed |
|
Straight-line |
Constant growth rate |
Historical data |
|
Moving averages |
Repeated forecasts |
|
|
Simple linear regression |
Compare one independent variable with one dependent variable |
10-20 data points per independent variable |
|
Multiple linear regression |
Compare multiple independent variables with one dependent variable |
Organizations must understand their internal performance, strategy, goals, investments, market trends, etc, to create more accurate and agile financial forecasts.
This requires lots of data and assumptions, which can quickly overwhelm FP&A relying on spreadsheets and manual effort.
Here’s a streamlined way to conduct financial forecasts:
Your FP&A team must work with other teams to locate, collect, aggregate, understand, and analyze financial data. Ensuring the accuracy and relevance of the collected data is crucial.
FP&A teams often face the challenge of consolidating data spread across different platforms, such as accounting software, CRM, ERP, HRIS, and business intelligence tools.
You can solve this by using financial forecasting software that integrates with your existing tech stack. This approach makes financial data from those platforms available in real-time on the forecasting software, creating a single source of truth for FP&A.
Effective collaboration helps all key stakeholders and teams understand the financial goals and outcomes achieved with the financial forecasts. It ensures your FP&A team doesn't work in a silo and receives enterprise-wide inputs.
Establish easy-to-access communication and collaboration channels between your FP&A team, sales, the business, and executives so they understand outside influencers and account for their impact on financial forecasts.
Use forecasting software that provides a cloud-based platform where everyone involved in the forecasting process can work together, see progress, and be accountable for their respective inputs.
While forecasting typically requires you to make a healthy amount of assumptions, relying on assumptions where you can use actual data is a recipe for disaster.
Research external data and rely on third-party forecasts and analyst reports to estimate the impact of market forces and economic realities on potential future performance.
You can also engage communities of financial professionals like consultants and advisors with experience in financial forecasting to get industry-specific knowledge, valuable insights, and benchmarking data.
Historical trends give you insights into past performance and performance drivers, which is great, especially when creating driver-based forecasts.
Analyze all corporate activities and past periodic performance to evaluate how different actions have impacted past financial forecast accuracy. Also, this is where you can apply methods such as linear regression and moving averages to see underlying patterns.
You can collect data from past forecasts, actual cash flow statements, P&Ls, and balance sheets and visualize it using charts or graphs. Then, create new forecasts and validate them using scenario analysis.
Management reporting presents the outcomes of your forecasts to stakeholders who monitor business performance and make decisions that guide operations.
Provide detailed financial forecasts and decision guidance to the business, executives, board of directors, and others. These reports include executive summaries, KPI dashboards, and performance comparison reports.
This process gives management all the information they need to assess the organization’s financial health and current trends, compare forecasts to actuals, and make data-driven decisions.
Pro tip: Use forecasting software with prebuilt reporting templates and automated report generation to give your stakeholders the reports they need whenever they need them.
Publish financial forecast reports and communicate the organization’s overall financial projections, estimations, and granular details to internal and external parties.
This helps you keep everyone aware of what goals they’re working toward and any assumptions you’ve made. You can use visualizations such as dashboards and charts to make your forecasts clear and easy to understand.
Encourage questions and feedback from internal and external stakeholders during this stage to foster buy-in and ensure alignment.
What do you do now that you’ve created financial forecasts that all stakeholders have bought into?
Use forecasts to guide teams in achieving set objectives. They provide daily, monthly, and quarterly to yearly projections of the organization's position, ensuring everyone understands the needed outcomes for these periods.
Guide planning, budgeting, modeling, and scenario planning with financial forecasts. Inform the allocation of assets and investments to achieve corporate financial goals and business objectives.
When selecting forecasting software for your business, it’s essential to consider key factors such as your company size, customer base, and operational needs. Here's a breakdown of what to prioritize:
Opt for software that’s intuitive and user-friendly to ensure a smooth adoption process. This reduces the learning curve for your finance team and encourages faster onboarding.
Implementation time is another critical factor. Most forecasting tools take six to twelve months from purchase to rollout, so you’ll want a solution that balances functionality with deployment speed.
When evaluating ease of use, make sure to:
The forecasting software you choose should integrate seamlessly with the tools you already use, such as ERP systems, accounting platforms, and HR software. Strong integration capabilities streamline data aggregation and provide a centralized view of your business operations.
Seamless integrations create a single source of truth, simplify collaboration, and support complex workflows like workforce planning, rolling forecasts, and operational planning.
Not all forecasting software is created equal. While basic tools can analyze historical data and predict outcomes, more advanced options can account for market volatility, evolving trends, and other dynamic factors.
How to choose the right fit for your business:
Scalability is critical to ensure your forecasting software remains effective as your business grows. A robust solution should handle increasing data volumes, user demands, and system integrations without compromising performance.
Switching software later due to scalability issues can be disruptive and costly. Choose a solution that aligns with your growth trajectory—for example, if you’re scaling from 50 to 500 employees, opt for software designed to handle enterprise-level operations.
AI and automation have become essential in modern forecasting solutions. AI forecasting tools can analyze vast layers of data to detect business insights faster and with greater accuracy, enhancing the reliability of business intelligence.
AI-driven tools leverage machine learning (ML) to improve over time by learning from new data. This continuous adaptation increases forecasting accuracy as the system independently identifies trends, seasonality, and unique patterns.
Automation further boosts productivity by reducing the time spent on routine tasks, such as report preparation and data entry. With less manual work, finance teams can shift their focus to strategic planning while AI-powered tools take on decision-support tasks. AI and automation represent the future of forecasting, providing cost-effective, high-speed solutions that meet the demands of accurate financial planning.
Which financial forecasting software solution is best for you?
If you’re in FP&A at a mid-market company, you need easy-to-use and scalable forecasting software with robust features that let you maintain your spreadsheet experience while leveraging the power of an advanced cloud platform.
This article provides a list of software options, but you can always research further by reading reviews on trusted sites like G2 and Capterra.
Book a free demo with Cube to see how the software works in real life.