LivePlan

Live Plan was perfect for my needs - it helped me shape my strategic plan and think through my start-up capital requirements and revenue projections. I loved that it gave me some industry benchmarks and suggested budget items (like employee payroll liabilities) I hadn't thought of. The templates were also very helpful to show me what a plan should look like.

I didn't like that the software didn't highlight at the beginning how to coordinate between my LivePlan line items and my Quick Bookls like items. It made using the review feature (to compare projections with performance) more difficult to use.

Cloud based, easy step by step process for planning for novices. Once you have put in the basics of revenue streams and costs its very easy to play "what if" type questions and see the impact on your forecast.
You can get into enormous detail if you want or build this up over time as you develop your thought process.

Where the product really falls down is when you want to compare with Actuals. It only connects to Xero and Quick Books and you have no control over the data or time period that it syncs at all - current year plus last two years, which is rubbish if your business has pivoted and you only want the last six months data for example.
Whats worse is you cant roll back the sync - you have to manually delete all sync'd data.
Further if you dont use Xero or QBooks, there is no option to import from a spreadsheet - so again you need a data entry person to manually enter actual data unless you want to spend ages doing it yourself...
Very disappointed as up to this point had liked the platform.

I like the ease and simplicity of building the projections and adjusting them with different scenarios.

The write up section is a bit limiting in certain aspects for example there are no font selection options if one wants to change to their company document preferred font style ( Century Gothic) as well as set my paragraphs as justified as opposed to left indented.I cannot import tables and adjust them within the plan document, The graphical representations of the projections are a bit visually limited in color and info graphic presentation options .particularly if one wants a more visual document.It would also be nice to have a quick preview option for the document as u build it without necessarily having to export or down load a pdf to get and idea of how it look in print.