Collaborative Planning & Forecasting

Build and execute plans as a team to achieve targets together

Name: Driver-Based Planning Platform - Drivetrain
Brand: Drivetrain
Rating: 4.9 (65 reviews)

Collaborate with department heads to build more accurate forecasts and streamline planning. Empower them with access to accurate data for improved decision-making and real-time performance tracking.

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Fueling finance teams globally

4.9

Rating by G2 users

Outcomes

Centralized planning

Break down silos and plan together as a team on a unified platform for better and efficient financial management.

Faster alignment on goals

Create a single source of truth for all your metrics and targets with information and data that always up to date and always accurate.

Improved visibility and efficiency

Give everyone the visibility they need with role-based access controls and in-app messaging to eliminate unnecessary emails.

Collaborate with your team to build more accurate revenue and expense forecasts

Work with department heads to understand key business drivers, changing market trends, and customer insights to inform your plans and forecasts and quickly make adjustments when needed.

Leverage their first-hand experience to create realistic scenarios by playing with different assumptions around headcount, ramp up time, and price.

Make your collaborations easier and faster with built-in workflows, slack, and email alerts.

Empower your team to make better decisions in real-time

With Drivetrain’s interactive dashboards, everyone has constant visibility on their KPIs and metrics. For example,regional sales leads can analyze the sales pipeline for their region from MQL to opportunity to closed won.

Team members can slice and dice data, create different views, and even drill down to the transaction level to identify reasons for variances to mitigate risks and identify opportunities.

Use automated alerts to let you know instantly when there's movement in any of the metrics that matter most to you.

“As a Finance team member I wanted a tool that serves all of my forecasting & reporting needs, but I also wanted something that would allow for cross-functional collaboration.

Drivetrain's reports are perfect for this, with features like tagging people in comments, user-level restrictions, customizable & visually appealing graphs, charts and, tables.”

Andrew De Fanti

FP&A Manager, Quantum Metric

Built for seamless, real-time cross-functional collaboration

Interactive visualizations & charts

With an intuitive UI, anyone can create charts to analyze data and look at trends.

In-app comments & Slack alerts

Tag stakeholders and collaborate with them on a central platform without back-and-forth over emails.

Approval workflows

Leverage built-in approval workflows to ensure data accuracy, accountability, and more efficient collaboration across teams.

Dimensional-level data masking

Hide sensitive information, such as employee-level compensation and sales quotas to ensure only those who need it can see it.

Granular role-based access

Maintain strict control over access to models and reports by creating custom roles and permissions.

Detailed audit & impact log

Use automated alerts to eliminate surprises when key business metrics are updated and leverage the detailed audit log to understand every change.

Frequently asked questions

What are the benefits of collaborative planning and forecasting?

CFOs and their finance teams are usually the ones responsible for financial planning and forecasting within a company. However, most know that their results will be more reliable to the extent that they seek input from other areas of the business, such as operations, sales and marketing to gather relevant data, insights, and key assumptions for their financial planning and forecasting.

Taking a cross-functional, collaborative approach to strategic financial management and planning offers many benefits, including:

1. Better alignment – Bringing different areas of the business into the planning and forecasting process helps them understand the impact of their decisions on the company’s strategic goals and make better decisions as a result.
2. More and deeper insights – Collaboration works both ways. Just as it helps different teams gain a better understanding and align with the company’s short- and long-term goals, it also provides the finance team insights into potential problems and opportunities that might otherwise be missed.
3. Greater agility – When the finance team is actively collaborating with other areas of the business, they can better stay on top of changes in the business environment and can respond more quickly.
4. More realistic budgets – Developing a strategic budget that aligns with the company’s strategic plan is ultimately the responsibility of the finance team, ensuring that it is realistic requires input from different departments to ensure that on-the-ground realities are considered.

While these benefits are harder to achieve for CFOs and finance teams still using Excel for their financial planning and forecasting, adopting a collaborative approach is still worth the effort. If you’re considering leveling up your planning processes with budgeting software or a purpose-built financial forecasting tool, set yourself up for success by looking for solutions with features that make collaboration seamless and easy.

What are the core collaboration features to look for in financial planning and forecasting software?

Most budgeting and forecasting tools as well as enterprise management (EPM) platforms include a variety of features that will support more collaborative planning processes. Here are some of the most important ones:

Built-in workflows that make it easier for people across different teams to work together and in a consistent manner.
In-app messaging features and email alerts and notifications, all of which make it fast and easy to get answers to questions that arise during the process.
Interactive, customizable dashboards to give everyone on every team constant visibility of their KPIs and metrics.
Role-based access control to make sure that people accessing the system can see or “touch” only the data they need to work with.
Audit logs to allow the finance team to trace the source of every change in the numbers so they can understand and verify them.

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How does Drivetrain support collaborative financial planning and forecasting?

Drivetrain is a comprehensive financial planning and analysis (FP&A) platform that combines robust planning and forecasting tools with best-in-class collaboration features. With Drivetrain, cross-functional collaboration has never been easier with features like:

Interactive dashboards that give teams clear visibility into their metrics and KPIs and the ability to drill down into the data to gain a deeper understanding of their performance.
In-app messaging via Slack to get answers fast and email alerts to let you know instantly if one of your metrics or something in your plan/budget has changed.
Built-in approval workflows to ensure data accuracy, accountability, and more efficient collaboration across teams.
Detailed audit logs to help the finance team understand and verify every change.
Granular role-based access control with the ability to create custom roles and permissions.
Dimensional-level data masking to hide sensitive information, ensuring only those who need it can see it.

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Collaborating effectively with multiple stakeholders is hard.
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Drivetrain makes it easy.