XLCubed have a deep experience in the design and delivery of Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting solutions across financial and non-financial projects. Our experience has shown that planning solutions range from the very simple only requiring a modicum of technology to facilitate a client’s needs through to sophisticated enterprise level multi-company modelling solutions.

At the high end of the market there are very expensive tools which purport to deliver high end functionality. Our tools are not designed to compete with these products but our belief is that many (if not most) planning solutions do not need that level of sophistication and indeed many of these tools end up with a high degree of customisation, and the additional cost required to develop this.

Whether your requirement is simply to write back from Excel or the Web to a database and version control your plan, or to build a fully work/process flow managed solution distributed across your organisation, we have the tools and experience to help.

Ultimately the cost/benefit is unique to each organisation and we believe in offering informed choice. In the most recent versions of Analysis Services, writeback performance is strong and when augmented with an Excel or Web based front end like XLCubed it is a great choice for many businesses. Where the business requirement is more involved or complex, it can be difficult to achieve this in native Analysis Services, and XLCubed offer an extension to enable full customisation of the writeback calculation and spreading process.

XLCubed provides full support for native Analysis Service writeback in the Excel and Web Editions of the software. Writeback can be through a grid (hugely extended Pivot table), or formula based model. Formal input templates can easily be created in Excel, and then used within Excel or published to the web for a web based collection model.

Native Analysis Services writeback is extended by the provision of a relational writeback option. To the end user this is transparent, but to the system developer it gives the capability to add additional calculations, transformations and rules as required within sql server stored procedures, and thus deliver the tailored solutions required in some business cases.