As businesses grow, financial data becomes more and more complex for spreadsheets. It is not only time-consuming but also involves manual interventions, making it prone to errors. Finance leaders and teams, irrespective of the size of the organization, are hard pressed to deliver accurate forecasts, generate actionable insights and make data-driven decisions—often with limited resources.
These reporting automation tools provide crucial insights into financial performance, helping businesses review current performance against the target, make the necessary course corrections, and allocate resources efficiently, ensuring that CFOs and finance leaders can deploy their energies and time on making informed strategic decisions.
Financial reporting tools allow you to create, analyze, and present financial statements and reports—including 3-statement model reports (e.g., P&L or income statement, balance sheet statement, and cash flow statement) along with other dashboards and non-financial reports/information required for the business—in real time.
In this guide, we have detailed seven of the best finance reporting software tools on the market in 2024. For each platform, there is a summary of key features related to finance reporting with a few pros and cons highlighted, which might be helpful as you evaluate your options.
The best finance reporting software compared
Choosing the best financial reporting tool for your business involves considering several features, such as native integrations, automated 3-way financial statements, variance analysis, interactive dashboards among a host of others.
Here, we have reviewed and compared a range of first, second, and third generation solutions to help you find the best fit for your business requirements (from startups to scaleups and enterprises).
The table below is intended to give you a high-level, side-by-side comparison of seven financial reporting tools as the starting point, followed by a more detailed discussion.
| Software/ Platform | Drivetrain | Datarails | Vena | Cube | Planful | Workday Adaptive Planning | Anaplan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $$ | $$ | $$ | $$ | $$ | $$-$$$ | $$$ |
| Best for | SMB to Mid-Market | SMB to Mid-Market | Mid-Market | SMB to Mid-Market | Mid-Market | Mid-Market to Enterprise | Enterprise |
| Type of FP&A solution | 3rd Generation | 3rd Generation | 2nd Generation | 3rd Generation | 2nd Generation | 2nd Generation | 2nd Generation |
| Native Integration | 200+ OOTB integrations | 70+ OOTB integrations | Few native integrations | 22 OOTB integrations | 100+ OOTB integrations | 7 OOTB integrations | 10 OOTB integrations |
| Dynamic Dashboards | |||||||
| Automated real-time financial statements & reports | |||||||
| On-demand Custom metrics | |||||||
| Collaboration with access control | |||||||
| Budget variance analysis | |||||||
| Scenario planning & modeling | |||||||
| Predictive Forecasting | |||||||
| Multi currency support | unknown | unknown | |||||
| Security & compliance | |||||||
| In-house implementation | yes | yes | unknown | unknown | unknown |
Drivetrain
Drivetrain is a third generation FP&A platform. It is a simple yet powerful platform for CFOs and finance teams for building financial models, flexible budgets, present board-ready reports, and What-If analysis tools.
With Drivetrain, you can easily consolidate your financial and business data (without IT support) and track all key financial and non-financial metrics in real time, on a single platform. This saves you the trouble of manually pulling and reconciling data from different sources.
Drivetrain’s powerful and scalable multidimensional modeling capabilities enables you to build complex financial models and custom financial reports for real-time analysis and accurate rolling forecasts at a much faster pace, in a single place.
$$
Small and Mid-market
Self-service interface (ranked #1 on G2 for ease of use)
Easy-to-use contextual collaboration feature with Slack integration
Real-time budget vs. actuals analysis with drill-down to transactional level
Best-in-class interactive visualizations
Automated 3-model statements
Custom report builder
Quickly roll-forward actuals
Agile planning and forecasting
Heavily focused on B2B businesses
Rapidly deployable native integrations
Built-in consolidations
Custom analytics
Scenario Planning and What-If Analysis
Automated metric calculations
Datarails is a solid lightweight Excel-based tool that supports several FP&A use cases—budgeting and planning, financial forecasting, variance analysis, and automated report generation. Users can continue to use their existing financial models in Excel. It also uses AI/ML algorithms for predictive analytics and financial insights.
$$
Small and Mid-market
Automated records for data accuracy
Native Excel for faster implementation
Workflow collaboration
Lacks a native Google Sheets integration
Users report the tool often freezing in the middle of an operation
Limited scalability and visualizations
Limited customization options
Data visualization tools
Financial data analytics
Monthly reports
Vena offers integrated business planning, financial reporting, regulatory compliance reporting, and financial close management—that can be customized for specific business needs and industry requirements. The tool was developed for Microsoft365 and comes with Power BI embedded to enhance functionality with native Excel—to cater to users who prefer spreadsheets but need it for more complex calculations.
$$
Mid-market
Secure templates for data protection
Version control
Compatible Excel interface
Technical skills needed to set up templates and reports
Cash flow model is limited
Takes too long to run/load large and complex workbooks
Users have reported implementation times running longer than estimated by several months
Flexible reporting
Financial planning and analysis
Automated financial reporting
Cube is a spreadsheet-native FP&A platform that helps businesses and finance teams streamline financial forecasting, workflow management and budgeting operations. On the Cube platform, companies don’t fundamentally change how they work, as it integrates smoothly with Excel and Google Sheets.
$$
Small to Mid-market
User-friendly user interface and controls
Simple formulas for making reports (Custom formulas not needed)
Data automation and consolidation
Native Google Sheets integration
Lack of flexibility in Excel reporting
Limitations with regard to drill downs
Reports require heavy formatting to be presentable
Not intuitive for non-finance users
Multidimensional analysis capabilities are limited to 8 top-line dimensions
Automated data consolidation
Multi-scenario analysis
Native Excel, Google Sheets and other integrations
Customizable dashboards
Centralized formulas and KPIs
Planful distinguishes itself from other financial reporting platforms with Planful Predict, which combines the data manipulation capabilities of FP&A tools with AI (more so than Datarails). It is aimed at top-level executives, such as CFOs and CEOs, to enable faster and more insightful decision-making and strategic planning.
$$
Mid-market
AI-enhanced financial and operational planning
Extensive integrations to consolidate data across systems
Easy to work with once set up and not requiring any changes
Has a longer implementation time
Collaboration is complex
Template setup is challenging
Setup can be challenging given the high number of customizable fields that leaves many users overwhelmed and requiring dependency on third-party system integrators
Financial close management
Financial consolidation
Workforce planning
Cash flow forecasting
Data visualization
Workday Adaptive Planning (formerly Adaptive Insights) is a second-generation web-based FP&A tool that has been around since 2003. While it has many features with robust capabilities, it’s built on a tech stack that is dated. This is reflected in its interface and workflows that increases total cost of ownership and time to value.
$$-$$$
Mid-market
Financial close and consolidation
Real-time analytics and insights
Flexible budgeting, scenario planning, and reporting options
Costly maintenance and technical support with the implementation quality dependent on how well the third-party system integrator understands your business model
Offers only 7 pre-configured data connectors. This invariably results in long implementation times (~6 months and above) for companies that have business systems outside of the ones supported resulting in delayed time to value
Users have reported challenges with Netsuite ERP integration and a significant lag in saving data inputs
High total cost of ownership
Annual planning and budget planning
Financial analytics
Rolling financial forecasts
Financial modeling
Anaplan is categorized as a second-gen FP&A tool, and is well-suited to enterprise businesses, particularly Fortune 2000 companies. It provides AI/ML features to generate financial insights.
$$$
Enterprise
Flexible and powerful software for scaling
Strong adaptability to business and data structural changes
Sophisticated what-if scenario modeling
Integration with other CRM and financial systems
Steep learning curve and implementation time in comparison to other software
Can be challenging for new users using large models
High total cost of ownership and designed for large enterprises
Forecasting
Compensation plan modeling
Scenario modeling
Anaplan Data Hub
Drivetrain vs. the field: Why Drivetrain is the best finance reporting software solution
Finance teams need a tool that is both powerful and scalable, as well as simple and efficient, enabling not only finance users, but non-finance users in an organization to deliver strategic impact with faster, better, proactive decision-making.
The information compiled in this guide is intended to give you a better understanding of the kinds of features you would look out for in a finance reporting software, per your business requirements.
The finance reporting software we’ve compared here are divided into two main categories—those that offer custom-built proprietary calculation engines for large-scale, complex financial modeling, along with those that use native Excel spreadsheets as the base and enhance its features and capabilities to make it more flexible.
Among these FP&A tools, Drivetrain has a distinct advantage. Drivetrain provides integrated planning, real-time monitoring and advanced analysis capabilities at scale in an intuitive, easy-to-use interface. It not only provides a highly scalable and powerful calculation engine, but also offers a delightful, easy-to-use spreadsheet-inspired UI, that uses plain-English formulas and budgeting templates for quicker time to value.
Therefore, with Drivetrain, you get the best of both worlds – a powerful, yet simple SaaS budgeting software solution.
Discover how Drivetrain can accelerate your financial reporting process
How to choose the right financial statement reporting software for your business
What is finance reporting software?
Financial reporting software is a specialized tool or system that enables businesses to automate financial processes, manage financial data, ensure data accuracy and integrity, and monitor the financial health of your company. These tools help you generate comprehensive financial statements and reports in real time, including three-statement model reports (P&L or income statement, balance sheet statement, and cash flow statement) along with other crucial dashboards (such as board and investor reports, annual reports and more) and non-financial information needed for the business.
Top 4 benefits of using financial reporting software
As your business grows, the need to control and stay on top of your finances and targets also increases. Financial reporting software enables you to make fully informed business decisions as it gives you access to crucial information, whenever and wherever you need it.
A third generation FP&A platform with excellent financial reporting capabilities is extremely beneficial in this regard.
Automated data consolidation and data validation
More often than not, sourcing and reconciling the data from various sources is a highly time-consuming and manual process, prone to errors and inaccuracies. Therefore, the main requirement of finance teams from any financial reporting software is to be able to automate the data consolidation and validation process, in a bid to accelerate the close cycle. This ensures a single version of truth for the entire company, allowing stakeholders to focus on strategic decision-making, instead of worrying about data accuracy/integrity.
Real-time visibility into your business
The other benefit of using a financial reporting software is it enables finance leaders with detailed insights into their financial performance, including revenue, expenses, and profitability, in real time. It streamlines on-demand reporting for the entire organization, and ensures that finance teams and the leadership have easy access to KPIs, metrics and trends, and reports through customizable dashboards—which is crucial for informed decision making and strategic planning.
More time for strategic planning
A robust finance reporting software can take care of all your legwork by automating all the time-consuming, tedious and error-prone manual tasks and reports, thereby ensuring you and your organization's finance team have more time to work on strategic planning, actionable insights and high-value activities for business growth.
Forecast faster and with more accuracy
Most finance reporting software include forecasting and budgeting capabilities—rolling forecasts (roll-forward periods when each reporting period closes), roll-ups, and predictive forecasting—ensuring finance leaders are well-equipped to create accurate financial projections and plan for future growth. These tools also have the capability to automatically update forecasts, based on any changes in actuals in your underlying data sources, and then reflect the updated forecast on your dashboards instantaneously.
What are the different types of finance reporting software?
Most finance teams focus their energies on data gathering and data consolidation. While the familiarity of spreadsheeting is a big plus when creating annual reports, budgets and forecasts, it does have limitations.
Since they require manual entry of data, making it more error prone, data integrity and accuracy becomes a big issue. Also, each department and team has their own preferred models and spreadsheets for budgeting and reporting, so reconciling all of it into a single source of truth for the organization can be a long-drawn process.
These challenges led to the creation, and continued evolution, of modern FP&A software or strategic finance software. In this section, we have compared seven of the best financial reporting tools on the market currently, indicating the maturity of each in terms of their FP&A features. Here we’ll take a look at the degree to which each solution relies on spreadsheets.
Source: Adapted from FP&A software classifications developed by Paul Barnhurst (The FP&A Guy).
| Software/ Platform | Drivetrain | Datarails | Vena | Cube | Planful | 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 |
Real-world use cases for a finance reporting software like Drivetrain
We lost two to three working days each month in extracting data from the ledgers into Excel, analyzing the numbers and building the P&L.
We had to repeat the process every time new entries were added or changed. Just reviewing the data to ensure we had the right numbers used to take up to four hours of our time.— Naga Subramanya, Associate Director of Finance, Airmeet
The biggest challenge for the finance team at Airmeet, a premium events and experiences platform, was that most of the financial operations were done on spreadsheets. The process for getting accurate, real-time insights into their financial and business health was tedious and time-consuming. The finance team had to manually consolidate MIS data—cutting and pasting data from multiple sources—making it more prone to errors and largely unproductive.
Aman Bafna faced similar challenges at Mindtickle, a market-leading sales readiness platform. As the Business Operations Lead, he needed real-time visibility into business critical metrics, but there was no single source of truth. Every quarter, his team spent an inordinately long time manually consolidating data into Excel from various sources—BambooHR, NetSuite and Salesforce—to calculate a few metrics and put together a Board-ready report. This caused a serious problem with data accuracy and resulted in discrepancies while preparing reports.
Both Naga and Aman needed a fast and flexible finance reporting and monitoring solution, purpose-built to prepare timely and accurate financial reports, and track progress against targets in real-time—without relying on IT or expensive data analysts and consultants.
This is where Drivetrain stepped in.
On the Drivetrain’s platform, the finance team at Airmeet was able to automate data consolidation and rollups in real time, for faster finance reporting and expense analysis, saving over 5 days every month. Drivetrain also freed up time for the finance team to collaborate with each budget owner, finalize budgets, and implement their forecasting models, saving four weeks in a year. This has given Airmeet’s FP&A team more time for strategic analysis and making faster ROI-based decisions—thanks to less manual spreadsheet work and more accurate data.
At Mindtickle, Drivetrain automated the data gathering and consolidation process for Mindtickle’s sales, marketing and revenue operations teams with a central database, enabling faster budget vs. actuals reporting & analysis.
They can also create custom reports faster and drill down to see the data behind the numbers, reducing the time and being prepared for answering critical business questions,and making Board-ready presentations in a few hours (previously, it took them about three weeks.
With faster and better access to key metrics that were previously hard to obtain, the Mindtickle team used Drivetrain to come up with accurate forecasts. They now have a monthly reporting cycle and have also built a weekly forecast model—by merging data from three business systems.
Features
1. Native Integrations
Without native integrations, real-time financial reporting can be challenging for finance teams. Integration with source systems eliminates the need for manual entry of data (and the resulting errors), thereby making more time and effort friendly.
Since SaaS businesses rely on a variety of systems for data, such as CRM, billing, and accounting, seamless integration helps ensure accurate and consistent financial reporting in real time across all the systems.
| Software/ Platform | Drivetrain | Datarails | Vena | Cube | Planful | 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. Dynamic dashboards
Visualizing financial data helps easily comprehend complex financial information quickly, and enables companies identify trends, patterns, and outliers more easily, to make netter, informed decisions.
Specifically, SaaS companies typically track a range of metrics related to user acquisition, retention, churn, and revenue. Customizable dashboards allow them to monitor these metrics and track the performance of their subscription-based business model effectively.
| Software/ Platform | Drivetrain | Datarails | Vena | Cube | Planful | Workday Adaptive Planning | Anaplan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Drill Down to Transaction-Level | |||||||
| Drill Down by Any Dimension | |||||||
| Global- and Report-Level Filters | |||||||
| Text Callouts/Notes in Dashboards |
3. Automated real-time financial statements & reports
At any given time, SaaS companies handle large volumes of data. Automation streamlines the financial reporting process, by eliminating manual entries and reducing the risk of errors—saving hours for finance teams and improving efficiency and accuracy.
It collects and processes data automatically from your source systems, provides real-time insights, and helps you get a report at any time, enabling rapid decision-making. This gives you timely insights into financial performance, allowing for quick adjustments to strategies and tactics
| Software/ Platform | Drivetrain | Datarails | Vena | Cube | Planful | Workday Adaptive Planning | Anaplan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reporting templates | unknown | unknown | |||||
| Automated 3-statement model statements | |||||||
| Custom Financial Reports |
4. On-demand metrics
Any sophisticated FP&A software should allow you to track financial ratios and business metrics in real-time. It should also give you the chance to automate calculation of any custom metrics, e.g., runway, cash in the bank, sales pipeline, bookings, CAC, retention, burn, net dollar retention, etc.
| Software/ Platform | Drivetrain | Datarails | Vena | Cube | Planful | Workday Adaptive Planning | Anaplan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
OOTB financial ratios and business metrics | |||||||
OOTB SaaS metrics (ARR, Runway, NRR, Burn Multiple, Payback Period, and 40 more) | |||||||
Automate and track custom metric calculations |
5. Collaboration with access control
User access controls and other permissions ensure that only authorized users are allowed to view and manage sensitive financial information, to prevent data breaches and unauthorized transactions.
| Software/ Platform | Drivetrain | Datarails | Vena | Cube | Planful | Workday Adaptive Planning | Anaplan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Commenting Threads | |||||||
Fine-Grained Role Based Access Control | |||||||
Slack Notifications |
6. On-demand variance analysis & reporting
Given the recurring revenue model of SaaS businesses, accurate forecasting and budgeting are essential for planning growth strategies, resource allocation, and investor relations. The FP&A software should enable you to build and automate your statements with a self-serve interface to perform actuals vs. budget and actuals vs. forecast analysis instantly, without any interventions from data analysts or IT. It should also help you create detailed variance reports.
| Software/ Platform | Drivetrain | Datarails | Vena | Cube | Planful | Workday Adaptive Planning | Anaplan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actuals vs. budget analysis | |||||||
| Actuals vs. forecast analysis |
7. Scenario planning & modeling
Scenario planning guides businesses through considerable uncertainty, by contemplating various paths of possibilities. Forecasts usually have inherent errors; the actual results may differ from what was anticipated.
To manage this uncertainty, finance professionals need to understand multiple scenarios and their drivers. They also need to manage multiple scenarios on demand, collaboratively and quickly (in real-time). A finance reporting software can help address this through forecast analysis, without involving data analysts or IT.
| Software/ Platform | Drivetrain | Datarails | Vena | Cube | Planful | Workday Adaptive Planning | Anaplan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| In-Memory Multidimensional Calculation Engine | |||||||
| Multiple scenario planning | |||||||
| Unlimited planning window (long range planning) | |||||||
| Custom data modeling | |||||||
| Model templates | unknown | unknown |
8. Security & compliance
SaaS businesses handle sensitive customer data and must comply with regulations, such as GDPR and PCI DSS. The software should adhere to industry regulations and provide robust security measures to protect sensitive customer and financial data, and maintain trust.
| Software/ Platform | Drivetrain | Datarails | Vena | Cube | Planful | Workday Adaptive Planning | Anaplan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SOC 2 Type II | |||||||
| ISO 27001 | unknown | ||||||
| Fine-Grained Role Based Access Control | |||||||
| Audit trails |
9.Onboarding, training & customer success
Reliable customer support and comprehensive training, along with easy access to best practices and resource documents, helps users maximize the value of the finance reporting software. It ensures that users can effectively utilize and leverage the software for their business requirements, as well as address any issues as they occur.
| Software/ Platform | Drivetrain | Datarails | Vena | Cube | Planful | Workday Adaptive Planning | Anaplan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Implementation time | 4-6 weeks | unknown | > 2 months | >2 months | >2 months | > 4 months | > 6 months |
| In-house implementation | Yes | unknown | No | unknown | unknown | No | No |
| White-glove onboarding | |||||||
| Self-service management (admin) | |||||||
| Dedicated customer support/success |
FAQ
1. How can you choose the right financial reporting software?
Here are some essential considerations to help businesses make an informed choice regarding finance report software:
- Identify your needs: Assess your organization’s specific reporting requirements. Determine the types of financial reports you need, the complexity of data consolidation, and the level of customization required to meet your unique business needs.
- Scalability: Consider the scalability of the software. Ensure that it can accommodate your business’s growth and handle increasing data volumes as your company expands.
- Integration capabilities: Check whether the financial reporting software can integrate with your existing accounting systems, ERPs, and other relevant applications.
- User-friendly interface: Look for a user-friendly interface that allows both finance professionals and non-technical/non-finance to navigate the platform, access insights, and create reports easily.
- Data security and compliance: Ensure that the reporting tool adheres to industry standards and regulatory requirements to protect sensitive financial information.
- Reporting flexibility: Customizable templates and interactive visualizations ensure that you can present data in a way that is easily understandable by your stakeholders and the board.
- Customer support and training: Adequate support and training ensure that your team can effectively use the software’s features to their full potential.
- Cost and ROI: Consider the total cost of ownership, including licensing fees, implementation, and ongoing maintenance.
- User reviews: Check for user reviews and recommendations on reliable platforms to gain insights into the software’s performance, reliability, and customer satisfaction.
2. Are there different types of finance reporting software?
There are three major types of financial reporting software:
- Accounting software with reporting features: These software solutions provide a comprehensive view of the company’s financial health, making it easier to assess performance, identify trends, and track expenses. Accounting software is a fundamental tool for businesses to manage their financial transactions and records. Popular accounting software tools typically include reporting features, allowing users to generate essential financial statements, such as balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow reports.
- Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software: ERP software is a comprehensive suite that integrates various business processes, including finance, accounting, human resources, and inventory management. This integration ensures that financial reports are accurate, up-to-date, and accessible across the organization. Within an ERP system, financial reporting modules play a critical role in consolidating data from different departments and entities.
- Corporate Performance Management (CPM) software: CPM software is designed to help organizations plan, budget, and forecast their financial performance. These tools go beyond basic reporting, offering advanced analytics, scenario modeling, and forecasting capabilities. It is particularly valuable for businesses seeking to optimize their budgeting processes and achieve greater financial efficiency.
3. Who are the typical users of finance reporting software?
Any stakeholder interested in the financial health and performance of their organization, such as CFOs and their finance teams, executives, department leaders, and investors, even non-finance users.
