Driver-based planning software

Boost agility in your business with driver-based planning

Name: Driver-Based Planning Platform - Drivetrain
Brand: Drivetrain
Rating: 4.9 (70 reviews)

Leverage key drivers to create flexible, accurate forecasts by focusing on the factors that will have the most impact on your business. Quickly adjust your forecasts and plans when needed to respond to market changes and internal developments.

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Fueling finance teams globally

4.9

Rating by G2 users

Outcomes

Improve forecast accuracy

Identify and leverage key drivers to account for costs and revenue more precisely.

Increase organizational agility

Respond quickly to changing conditions by making quick adjustments to key drivers.

Streamline decision-making

Keep your team focused and aligned on what's truly important for faster decision-making.

Create flexible financial models that adapt as your business evolves

Easily link the key drivers of your business such as headcount, price, and marketing spends to financial outcomes to ensure your models are always grounded in reality.

Create multiple scenarios quickly and easily by varying the assumptions for different drivers with an Excel-like modeling interface and natural language formulas.

Accelerate decision-making with real-time insights

Ensure business stakeholders have access to up-to-date and accurate information with real-time data flowing into Drivetrain with 200+ native integrations for ERP and CRM systems, HRIS, and virtually any other business application you use.

Help your team make smarter decision and stay on track with a constant view of how key drivers and assumptions are varying over time and against plan and forecasts.

“Drivetrain brings all of our data Sources into one location and allows us to eliminate manually updating things in Sheets and Excel. Having a frozen snapshot in time in an easy to use platform saves time and allows for more accurate forecasting/reporting analysis.”

Sean Adair

Accounting Manager at Klue

Built for faster, more accurate driver-based planning

Connected planning

Connect all your models and plans to fully assess the business impact of a change in any one driver.

Scenario modeling & analysis

Run What-If scenarios and perform root cause analyses in minutes to be better prepared for the future.

Variance analysis

Automate BvA analysis to quickly reveal deep insights that can improve financial planning.

Topline modeling

Easily build a flexible model using key drivers such as conversion rate, sales efficiency, and marketing spends.

Expense planning

Play around with headcount, compensation, CAC, and other drivers to optimize your spending.

Budget modeling

Improve budget allocation by easily identifying the activities that will lead to the highest impact on the company’s strategic goals.

Frequently asked questions

What is driver-based planning?

Driver-based planning, also known as driver-based budgeting, is a type of financial planning that focuses on the drivers that have the most impact on your business.

Instead of relying purely on past performance data or simple percentage increases, driver-based planning and budgeting are based on past operational and financial data and validated with different types of analyses to determine what activities are contributing the most value to the business. It is a deeply data-driven process that usually results in a very accurate plan.

Once you’ve identified the key value drivers, the idea is to prioritize them in your budget, doubling down on those activities or initiatives that will have the greatest impact on revenue growth.

How do you do driver-based planning?

At a high level, there are three basic steps in driver-based planning:

1. Identify the growth drivers in your business, including internal drivers that are under your control as well as any external drivers that aren’t.
2. Allocate as much as possible of your available resources to your growth drivers, focusing on those you can control.
3. Validate your budget with scenario modeling and what-if analyses to test different allocation scenarios.

Note that if you’re using spreadsheets for your budgeting, driver-based planning can be pretty cumbersome, not to mention highly prone to error. Using a scenario planning tool can solve both of these issues by eliminating most of the manual effort software associated with this step. Using a more comprehensive, purpose-built financial planning and analysis (FP&A) solution like Drivetrain will typically provide these capabilities and more to make adopting driver-based planning and budgeting easy.

How can Drivetrain help me with driver-based planning and budgeting?

With more than 200 pre-built connectors and the ability to create custom integrations, you can connect virtually any source system with Drivetrain. This means you can automatically consolidate all the data you need to support the different types of modeling and analysis necessary for driver-based planning into a single platform. Here are just a few examples:

You can build a flexible top-line model using key drivers such as conversion rate, sales efficiency, and marketing spends.
You can also play around with headcount, compensation, CAC, and other drivers to optimize your budget allocations.
With robust scenario modeling capabilities, you can quickly and easily create multiple scenarios by varying the assumptions for different drivers.

No matter what kind of modeling or analysis you’re doing, Drivetrain makes it easy with a familiar Excel-like interface and natural language formulas that help you get up and running quickly.

With all your data in a single platform, Drivetrain makes it easy to connect all your models and plans to fully assess the business impact of a change in any one driver.

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Driver-based planning is hard.
Drivetrain makes it easy.