Break down silos between financial, operational, and workforce plans. Move beyond spreadsheets to a single source of truth.
Explore Connected Planning →Connected planning is when your organization's financial, operational, and workforce plans share a single source of truth. Changes in one area automatically cascade through the others.
In a connected planning system:
Without connected planning, you have separate models (FP&A in one tool, revenue in another, headcount in a spreadsheet). When an assumption changes, you manually update multiple places—and inevitably something gets missed.
Real example: Your CFO updates revenue forecast by 20%. In a connected system, that flows automatically through headcount plans (you know how many salespeople you need), compensation models (bonus pools adjust), and cash flow forecasts. In disconnected systems, you're doing this manually across 5–10 different spreadsheets and tools.
Many organizations build planning processes on Excel or Google Sheets. This works at small scale but breaks down as you grow:
Finance has one version of the revenue forecast, sales has another. When it matters most (close to actual results), you're fighting version control. Multiple copies exist with different assumptions. Nobody knows which one is current.
Every plan requires pulling data from multiple source systems (ERP, HCM, CRM, data warehouse). This is manual, error-prone, and creates duplicate work. When data changes upstream, your plans are stale.
Creating alternative scenarios in spreadsheets means copying files and manually changing assumptions. With 100+ variables, you quickly lose track of what changed and why. A true "what-if" capability is nearly impossible.
Who changed what, and when? In spreadsheets, you have no automatic audit trail. For finance organizations, this creates compliance headaches and makes month-end close difficult.
Email-based file sharing leads to conflicting edits, overwritten changes, and communication gaps. Finance, operations, and sales teams are working on stale data.
As you add entities, products, or dimensions, spreadsheets become unwieldy. Formulas break, performance slows, and maintenance becomes a full-time job for one person.
The pattern we see: Companies outgrow spreadsheets when they hit about 50–100 users or multiple departments needing to collaborate. That's when the cost of maintaining spreadsheets exceeds the cost of implementing a platform.
Anaplan (part of Salesforce) and Pigment are the two leading platforms for connected planning. Both enable you to move beyond spreadsheets and build true single-source-of-truth planning systems.
Anaplan is the established leader. It's powerful, flexible, and scales to very large enterprises with complex consolidation needs. It's the platform of choice for companies with 50+ entities or deeply complex financial models. Anaplan can handle nearly any use case, but it requires specialized expertise and longer implementation timelines.
Pigment is the newer, faster-growing alternative. It's built for speed and usability. Pigment excels at SaaS companies and modern organizations because it has native connectors to the tools you're already using (Salesforce, HubSpot, NetSuite, Stripe). Pigment implementations are typically faster and less expensive than Anaplan, but it's best-suited for companies with 1–30 entities.
Both platforms enable connected planning. The choice depends on your organization's scale, complexity, and existing tech stack. We have deep experience in both—see our detailed comparison for more.
Let's walk through a real example of how plans connect across a SaaS company:
In this system, if the CFO says "we're being more conservative on Enterprise growth—lower to 60M," that flows automatically through revenue, headcount, compensation, and cash flow. Everything recalculates in minutes. No manual updates. No version mismatches.
That's connected planning.
PlanFlamingo specializes in building connected planning systems for finance-first use cases:
Monthly/quarterly rolling forecasts that consolidate revenue, headcount, and operational costs into a unified P&L and cash flow.
By-segment revenue forecasts driven by pipeline, win rates, and deal size. Integrates with Salesforce for live pipeline feeds.
Forecast headcount needs by department, level, and region. Connected to compensation to show fully-loaded cost.
Allocate revenue targets to regions, accounts, and individuals. Live quota dashboards that adjust as territory changes.
Calculate bonus pools and commission payouts based on plan achievement. Build commission engines that handle complex tiering, splits, and disputes.
Moving from Anaplan to Pigment (or between legacy tools)? We handle the migration, refactoring, and training.
Book a free scoping call with our founders. We'll understand your planning challenges and show you what's possible.
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