Datarails Reviews

The ease in which the product was to learn and become and expert in. The functionality within the solution is exactly what any FP&A professional should be looking for in a solution. The implementation was extremely efficient as you start to build out real life business processes from the outset which mean you get a return on investment from day 1.

When deciding to partner with DataRails I was fully aware that they are at the beginning of solution development journey. However, DataRails are always keen to receive feedback on possible suggestions for improvement and are continuously developing and releasing improved functionality.

Value for money, ease of use and accuracy. Because the program is excel based it did not take long for the team to master. Created an efficient process and removed the manual work from the department by automating the vast amounts of data in a matter of minutes. As the work load grew the product became more valuable to the company.

One difficulty was when a Microsoft patch was released it caused some issues with a formula, but the support desk was able to help correct when we brought it to their attention.

The flexibility of Datarails is fantastic. We’ve been able to draw in multiple data sources to present a clear picture of our financial situation with the additional context.

The onboarding process can take a few months. You are told upfront that it takes about 3 months. In our case, it took us about 6 months of working daily with their team to be ready to go. They were very supportive, but it does take time.

Easy to navigate and set-up the dashboards

It doesn't work well with Quickbook Desktop. It requires a lot of manual processes. It does not automatically integrate with the QB desktop version. It's too cumbersome.

The dashboard and visualizations are the best part of Datarails. Our finance team can readily create the visualizations on our data that I can benefit the most from. Deltas and variances jump out at you, trendlines are clear, and the data reporting capabilities really are in a class by themselves.

Like any FP&A tool, it starts out slow. Your team has to learn how to leverage the tool and work with data that is originating outside of financial systems. It's taken us well over a year to get to the point where we're getting results and answers faster through Datarails than by manually creating a one-off report in Excel. The work has been worth it though, and it's just one of those inevitable aspects of leveling up your reporting and forecasting capabilities: it's not going to happen overnight or without a lot of training and validation work.

Finance is pleased with the ease of use and accessibility of data

Would be happy if there were more frequent updates

Well said! Providing a reporting solution that works on excel is what separates us from our competitors. Please get in touch with your account manager to hear about our most recent updates, they are pretty exciting!

-There are many ways to manipulate and look at your data -Drill downs are amazing. Can look at the smallest of variables. -Can work on both Excel and their Insights feature depending on what I want -Easy to use -Easy to connect with our ERP system

Sometimes it was buggy when logging out. Other than that I can't think of any other notable cons, it really is a great system.

Companies that use DataRails don't need to migrate from excel, which is why choosing DataRails doesn't require making any changes to internal workflows. As you pointed out, noticing the smallest variables is what we believe is key to accurate, flexible and efficient reporting.

DataRails provides us with version control, data transformation, and visualization tools that we did not have before. We have streamlined many of our reporting processes, and we also use DataRails to feed a number of Excel and PowerPoint-based reports. DataRails support is very responsive.

Some features don't work as expected, and it can be hard to tell if it because of a bug or user error.

Datarails is an exhaustive FP&A tool and great for Budgeting and variance analysis. The Report Builder is a powerful feature that helps to review results by Office, department & Cost centers. This is my first year using Datarails & it is the only FP&A software I have tried but I am very happy with it thus far. The implementation team & Customer Success Manager was very knowledgeable, smart, responsive & understood our business needs quickly to provide an ideal solutions for creating our first Budget in Datarails.

The features are awesome but some of these are too complex to use without help from Datarails team member. Once the basic reports are created by Datrails team, it is then manageable to update filters and make format changes as needed. Building a report from scratch is difficult as the data mapper is too technical & hard to comprehend.

The customer service has been oustanding from the beginning. The platform is completely customizable.

There is a lot to learn, because it's a rich environment. But there is plenty of support to help you figure it out.

Thank you for your review Shelly!

This software was very easy to implement as we transitioned from a different software. what sold us on DataRails was the ability to continue to use our current reports. Dashboard views are also great, it gave us the ability to report on operations metrics , versus some software's that only focus on financial reporting. We also really liked the idea of having a dedicated customer rep , this has been extremely helpful thru the implementation, but also in creation of all our reports

Would like to see more development in consolidation/conversion, as well as adding to dashboard reporting.

My favorite part about this software is how easy it is to understand the logic that is going on behind the scenes. We are a holding company of 18 different operating companies using DataRails to automate our financial reporting process, as well as house all of our financial data in one system. Knowing how it works behind the scenes in critical and using the backend mapping is easy in order to make changes, fix errors, etc.... It makes it pretty easy to understand for the average user.

There is always room for improvement, like with anything. I think the biggest challenge for our company is not having all our accounting systems integrated into the system due to some industry specific accounting softwares not being able to integrate into DR. I think one thing that would be great would be more training videos or education in order to not rely on the customer success manager as much, just to improve efficiency and time.

Thanks Joseph for the amazing review. We couldn't be happier to work with you and the team. We look forward to improving the global scorecard, the various performance reports and dashboarding capabilities.

The overall flexibility of the platform. DataRails was able to create exactly what I wanted using our existing data structure and financial models. DataRails was able to replicate all of the benefits of other more well known Planning Solutions at a much lower investment cost - both financial and human capital.

Certain aspects of our monthly forecasting process require more manual intervention than other more mature planning applications.

We found the software very easy to implement as we were able to quickly interface our current Excel Spreadsheets with DataRails.

We are currently using DataRails primarily for Budgeting and we are using a significant number of spreadsheets/Budget Schedules to feed into the budget. The more sheets you add, the more DataRails slows down in order to update the budget when you revised one of these spreadsheets. If different people are updating various spreadsheets at the same time, it takes more time for DataRails to update all budget figures.

Using DataRails I can visualize data that I previously didn't have access to, this is by far the biggest pro-you can tap into data you've always had but previously couldn't work with. Other than that it's really easy to use, implementation is not lengthy, great customer service.

Occasionally freezes but I figure that happens with any sort of system

Helping decision makers make data driven decisions by tapping into hidden data is what DataRails was created for. Thank you for highlighting these advantages!

1-We started using their Insights feature instead of our BI. Really useful. 2-Made data collection easy and organized 3-Constant access to up-to-date numbers

would be nice if it had the option of drag and drop for inputs

Glad to hear your team benefits from our platform on a daily basis. As you mentioned, Jim, data consolidation and flexible reporting are game-changing benefits that we offer our customers.

Seamless integration with Excel User friendly interface Has streamlined our budgeting process

Occasionally there are glitches in our templates

We couldn't have said it better, Theresa! Providing our system's reporting benefits while enabling our customers to stay in excel makes using DataRails so much easier.

This product has allowed me to maintain my existing excel worksheets while speeding the closing process and allowing me to focus on variance analysis as opposed to simply on reporting

I would like to see waterfall charts as part of the graphic offered

Thank you Lew. We look forward to more weekly sessions focused on productivity and finding new ways to improve the financial analysis workflows in your organization to Excel to the power of DataRails.

Drill down features in both data and graphs/charts. The integration with diverse software packages is also super convenient.

Really robust product. DataRails has a learning curve, but once the approach is learned its super intuitive.

The way the features are now integrated with Excel, the more "active" way it organizes files tags and compares versions.

I originally had a little trouble with the interface from excel (widget popups) but they replaced this with simple right-clicks and tighter integration with Excel and windows explorer that has not only eliminated the problems, but made it easier to use.

Happy to hear that our customer support was helpful. As each and every one of our happy customers knows, anything and everything that our customer support can do for you is a simple request away. Thank you for ranking us 10/10 in every aspect.

Great customer support, they do a lot of the work so I can just feed data and get the information I need in the format I want.

Sometimes the software is cumbersome. Support always helps with any issues I have but I wish it was user friendly enough that I could do more without assistance. I am still learning and do more every month on my own.

Thank you Bradley for the positive review! As you mentioned, using DataRails is how finance teams supercharge their Excel spreadsheets. Our great support team was thrilled to get such positive feedback on their amazing customer service.

Allows for the reduction of errors, improves reporting, more time for analysis

Takes a little bit of getting used to but what system doesn’t

Mark, we are happy to help your team in reducing errors and improving the quality of their reports to Excel to the power of DataRails. You hit the nail on the head in what that enables Finance employees to do when we do the heavy lifting for them. Using DataRails enables analysts to learn what their data means when they spend less time creating manual reports.

It can be confusing to manage and update new data mappers (for users not very familiar with Data), but the support I've received and the willingness of my CSM, [SENSITIVE CONTENT], truly makes Datarails shine over other competitors. His willingness and availability is extremely helpful to our organization

Small bug issues, little features to develop more (like exporting data to a ppt or new excel)

Before implementing DataRails, we had no idea what is going on with our spreadsheets across our organization. Today, we have a clear overview of our EUC operations across the organization including real time alerts on any suspicious activity. Our finance users are happy with the benefits the application delivered to their day to day work.

As a SaaS solution, DataRails release a weekly versions which sometime require our teams to learn these changes on the go.

Thank you for pointing out the real time reporting. As many people learn the hard way, learning too late of suspicious activity is devastating to many organizations. Using DataRails, these activities can be detected instantly and handled accordingly.

The software is very good. Changes between versions can be easily identified. Displays the activity in the software. Customer Support is excellent.

The tree view and viewchanges in conected files.

Thank you for highlighting such an important benefit that DataRails users gain from our tool. Not only do we help with data consolidation and automating reports and budgeting, we also provide the option to track changes on excel.