From left to right – Martin Milanov and Milen Manev, Co-founders of PlanDelta.
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Written by Vassil Terziev, Managing Partner at Eleven.
The founders of PlanDelta have been friends for 25 years and it was almost by chance that they discussed the idea behind PlanDelta over lunch and made the decision to become partners immediately, before the dessert and check came.
As a CFO of an IT computer graphics company, Martin felt the pain of suboptimal planning firsthand. Milen, Tech VP of an US based HR software, confirmed that many of their clients were also facing this issue. After committing fully to the company, Martin and Milen leveraged their combined network and 30+ years of experience and were able to quickly validate gaps in current offerings: Planning tools are narrowly focused, stimulating silos and preventing integrated planning. Most of the leading tools were designed by ex-CFOs to serve the finance function, thus not bridging the gap with the business stakeholders.
PlanDelta is a next generation planning tool
aiming to bridge the gap between strategic and financial planning and inspire company-wide generation to get a real time view on their “planned vs actual” data and share their ideas for improvement. PlanDelta takes budgeting from the waterfall to the agile era through a continuous distributed planning year round.
Only 3% of companies have strategic, operational and financial planning processes that are fully aligned and integrated,
Gartner’s research shows. While according to a research by BPM Partners, 84% of organizations using an FP&A (Financial planning and analysis) platform still end up working with Excel.
However, the market is evolving and in the last few years we witness how cloud based financial planning systems are starting to replace the legacy “on-premise software aided by excel spreadsheets and offline decision making”. Today’s FP&A software solutions must support elements such as integrated planning, forecasting, flexible and driver based modeling, communication and collaboration, as well as management and performance reporting.
Business is done faster and market dynamics are changing swiftly, so the traditional budgeting process that happens once per year or even revised after each quarter is an outdated practice.
Traditionally FP&A software has been catering to the needs of high, mid and large enterprise clients
and the tier of small to low mid clients was not very attractive to the main cloud FP&A vendors. Not only are these clients less lucrative, but for the most part they would get overwhelmed by the enterprise grade products – their implementation usually is a challenging task with high switching cost and can take 6+ months.
PlanDelta aims to serve namely this low-mid segment
that is currently outside the focus of incumbent cloud FP&A providers. The team aims to enable fast-growing companies to streamline their financial planning and make this process integrated with strategic planning in realtime. The vision is for financial planning to be a continuous process, which is collaborative within the organization’s stakeholders and is in sync with the various aspects of the business.
At present, because the target market is underserved, the companies have to cope with the limitations of Excel, which makes the planning process restricted to a complex web of files that easily get outdated, nor can be audited. The team of PlanDelta believes that within the next five years the needs of such companies will create a market for superior cloud financial solutions that serve SMEs. So in its offering, PlanDelta focuses on few key points:
- How to deploy a controlled environment to the planning process, without sacrificing the ease of use and flexibility of Excel.
- How to introduce Planning Dimensions that would allow the business to customize the planning templates to their specific biz model.
- How to link powerful tools to pull and map data from the various systems in the enterprise and autocomplete with AI and Prescriptive Analytics.
As of this moment PlanDelta is a team of 6 and they currently have two more openings for engineering positions, which they plan to hire in the upcoming months.
Do you want to pilot test PlanDelta for your company? Do you know the right engineer for their team? Visit their website and get in touch – http://plandelta.com/.
