TravelBank vs IBM Planning Analytics

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Our analysts compared TravelBank vs IBM Planning Analytics based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Accounting Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

IBM Planning Analytics Software Tool

Product Basics

TravelBank is a cloud-based expense and travel solution that helps small and mid-sized businesses control spend, track expenses and book travel. It provides automated expense reports and direct deposit reimbursements while managing flight, accommodation and other travel expenses. It gives users the freedom to either upload expense receipts through a mobile phone camera or enter them manually. Users get multi-currency support and can sync credit cards and bank accounts to expedite reimbursements.

It enables users to book flights at corporate rates and prompts them to use less expensive services. It also calculates savings based on employee purchases. The mobile application is compatible with iOS and Android. It seamlessly integrates with third-party accounting applications like Quickbooks, Bill.com, Xero and NetSuite.
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IBM Planning Analytics is a multidimensional in-memory database for analytics and planning. Part of the IBM Analytics Suite and powered by TM1, it provides forecasting, budgeting and reporting at an enterprise scale through data compression. With all data connected to a central hub, it enables collaborative planning with workflow approvals and review protocols in place. Enterprises perform OLAP analysis faster through in-memory technology.

Integrating with Microsoft Excel, it gives businesses the ease and familiarity of working with spreadsheets with the power of an enterprise database. With automated time-series modeling, it enables self-service predictive analysis. The vendor offers a 30-day free trial.
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$25/User, Monthly
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Tailored to your specific needs
$825 Monthly
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Tailored to your specific needs
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Product Insights

  • Quicker Employee Reimbursement: Pay for employees’ out-of-pocket expenditures quicker than manual processes. Give them the freedom to submit a report automatically to concerned persons for approval. Automatically reimburse correct amounts to the payroll. Eliminate the possibility of errors and delays while boosting employee satisfaction.  
  • Minimize Processing Cost And Time: Eliminate costs associated with employees and managers by manually matching amounts or searching for receipts. Save time by automating sending reports for approval, flagging potential out-of-policy expenses and submitting approved reports for payments. Consolidate expense management, corporate travel and card management into one solution. Run accounts payable reports on time instead of waiting for them to be routed and approved.  
  • Boost Operational Efficiency: Bill expenses directly to clients to ensure accuracy to maximize cash flows. Integrate with time tracking, ERP, accounting and project management tools to simplify approvals and reporting. Give employees the time to focus on value-added tasks instead of mundane, error-prone and time-consuming reports. 
  • Ensure Expense Policy Enforcement: Enforce custom rules tailored to the business and ensure that employees are up to date with new expense policies and tax changes. Flag out-of-policy travel expenses and eliminate the possibility of expense fraud like split claims, deviations from the norm or altered receipts. 
  • Increase Compliance: Stay compliant with local, state and federal tax agencies. Categorize and tag expenses automatically based on past entries and credit card statements. Get easily accessible electronic copies of reports and receipts, which can be helpful during audits.  
  • Improve Visibility: Get compiled employee expense data on the dashboard and deliver it in a digestible visual format using charts and graphics. Check metrics to understand spend per employee or the average time it takes to approve expense reports. 
  • Manage Digital Receipts: Automatically capture receipts digitally and parse them to create expense report entries. Digitally manage receipts by dragging and dropping from the desktop or using mobile phones. 
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  • Maximize ROI: Save time for analysis of trends, business performance and results by creating project plans faster. Reallocate budget and resources by leveraging deep insights into business performance and market trends. Collaborate with others on a single, unified platform with total transparency and visibility into business data, available for all plans. 
  • Boost Sales: Win more business opportunities – boost annual sales quotas and deal sizes through end-to-end sales workflows. Grow revenue and reduce time to insight with robust sales analytics. Track campaigns for performance monitoring in real time and deep dive into data for buying behavior and customer churn analysis. 
  • Financial Planning and Analysis: Optimize the business’ performance through valuable financial insights. Ensure the business is on track by creating and managing plans, budgets and forecasts. Simplifies the budgeting process through real-time calculations with automatic application of business rules. 
  • Optimize Supply Chain: Create more accurate demand forecasts, get a clearer view of the resources and budget required to fulfill projected demand and update production plans accordingly. View historical data and drill down into summaries for deep-dive analysis and add visuals to spot key KPI trends. 
  • Workforce Planning: Increase the workforce’s efficiency by acquiring and retaining skilled employees at the right time. Effectively manage staff schedules, task assignment and performance tracking through workforce analytics and HR planning tools. 
  • Deploy Anywhere: Access the same data from everywhere with the flexibility to deploy on-premise, in the cloud or as a combination of both. 
  • Scalable: Build and change plans flexibly in real time to match business requirements. Scales with increasing data volumes, number of users and planning models, without impacting existing workflows and performance. 
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  • Quick Scan: Autocomplete receipts in a matter of seconds. Allow employees to sync credit cards for instant scanning and quicker approvals and reimbursements. 
  • Currency Conversion: Convert 150 currencies to USD automatically for international traveling. Avoid being charged extra fees for currency conversion on credit card statements. Reduce refunds and chargebacks and ensure consistency in pricing displays.  
  • Expense Report: Automate expense reports and boost visibility into business spend with one-click approval. Take a photo of the receipt and let the scanning technology pick up the details and auto import expenses. Sync cards to pull transactions directly into expense reports. Automatically import transactions from over 48000 personal, corporate cards and banks. Edit expense details with a single click. Submit expense reports and automatically generate a PDF copy. Forecast future trends and enhance employee behavior by using historical data. Get real-time insights and improve visibility. Ensure seamless integration with leading third-party applications like QuickBooks and Bill.com to map categories and synchronize expense reports, reimbursements and corporate card data. 
  • Card Management: Automatically sync transaction and card information. Check which transactions have or haven’t been submitted by reconciling credit card information. Gain visibility into every transaction and monitor expense compliance by syncing corporate cards. Manage spend from a single platform by integrating with the bank of preference. Automatically sync transactions and purchasing information into expense management. Eliminate end-of-month headaches by staying on budget with the reconciliation process. Track transactions and compliance in real time within the management dashboard. Get support for and import transactions from over 48,000 personal and corporate cards and banks. 
  • Corporate Travel Management: Empower employees to make better decisions by rewarding them for smart spending. Save on inventory rates by gaining access to negotiated rates otherwise reserved for large corporations. Get 24/7 support from a dedicated team of travel agents via chat, phone, email or Slack. Gain access to over 500,000 hotel properties and home-sharing options. Get alternative lodging options to boost flexibility and savings for travel programs. Get access to a list of curated flight bookings with a special corporate rate for business travel flight bookings. Search and reserve pick ups at the airport from desktop or mobile apps.  
  • Premium Insights: Monitor trends, spend and leakage on a user-friendly, fully customizable dashboard that boosts visibility. Customize and export data to track and report on every metric. Monitor real-time spend and compliance with employee spending against the company policy. Automate alerts and set up trigger reports that send reports to the inbox anytime there is an exception or a threshold is met. Keep a tab on how often employees are booking over or under budget and monitor total savings against the company policy. Improve employee behavior and forecast future trends using historical data. Check top vendors from the company according to the categories. Keep track of the highest spenders and see how employee adoption and compliance with the booking platform changes over time. 
  • Integration: Get support for thousands of corporate and personal cards and boost visibility into every card transaction. Ensure smooth business operation with an app that seamlessly integrates with ERPs, single sign-on, identity management tools, human resource information systems and more.  
  • End-to-End Travel and Expense Management: Improve visibility, expedite tracking, enable budget management, ensure error-proof data entry and clear travel policies. Automate expense management and save time spent on capturing expenses. Gain input from one source of truth and one point of contact. Get easy access to travel and expense tools with single sign-in benefits.  
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  • Architecture: Leverage a three-tier client-server architecture that includes a database, application server and front end, with data stored centrally in the OLAP server. 
    • TM1: Employs an efficient data compression algorithm to enable faster planning and analytics. Create business models by combining multiple data sources with manual input for effective decision-making. 
  • Workspace: Create and access all plans and forecasts through its web-based interface. Grant role-based access to team members down to cell-level granularity. Collaborate on plans through chats and cell comments in the workspace. 
    • Data Visualizations: Choose from a rich library of visualizations to apply that includes bullet charts, waterfall charts, treemaps, word clouds and more. Input data intuitively to specific slots through drag-and-drop actions, and customize fonts and styles for personalized branding. 
    • Books and Views: Access related data in the form of web sheets, scorecards, videos and embedded web pages from a single interface. Leverage defined selections of a data cube — views — for analysis and data exploration, and export as an Excel worksheet. 
  • Performance Tracking: Compare targets with actual results, and with actual performance over time. Quickly find the desired metrics and create visually compelling scorecards such as impact diagrams, strategy maps and custom diagrams. Add existing scorecards to books and analyze data over different periods, metrics and dimensions. 
  • Data Modeling: Autonomously build a financial model by converting business requirements into cubes, dimensions, hierarchies and calculations. Transform and load data easily into a financial model, without the need to code. 
  • Sandbox Environments: Work in a sandbox to manipulate data as needed in real time without impacting actual data. Compare different scenarios and test assumptions to see the impact of potential decisions. 
  • Microsoft Excel Integration: Go beyond what spreadsheets can do – perform multi-dimensional analysis and big data exploration within the Excel interface, retaining its full functionality and formatting. Find answers to business questions by creating reports from Cognos TM1 through interactive drag-and-drop actions. 
  • AI-Based Automation: Speed up planning cycles and get more reliable results. Create plans, forecasts and budgets through automated model creation, natural language processing and cognitive analytics. 
  • On-Demand Module: Generate dynamic dashboards from existing Excel spreadsheets through autonomous data exploration. Move from annual planning to rolling forecasts based on real-time information by identifying variances in plans caused by external data. 
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Product Ranking

#159

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#335

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User Sentiment Summary

Excellent User Sentiment 125 reviews
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93%
of users recommend this product

TravelBank has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 93% when considering 125 user reviews from 1 recognized software review sites.

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4.65 (125)
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Awards

TravelBank stands above the rest by achieving an ‘Excellent’ rating as a User Favorite.

User Favorite Award

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Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Easy Receipt Capture: Users praise TravelBank's ability to effortlessly capture receipts using their phone's camera, eliminating the need for manual entry and saving valuable time.
Automated Expense Reports: The platform's automated expense reporting feature streamlines the process by automatically generating reports based on captured receipts and travel data, reducing manual effort and minimizing errors.
Real-Time Spending Insights: TravelBank provides real-time visibility into spending patterns, allowing users to track expenses as they occur and make informed decisions to stay within budget.
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Flexible Modeling: Users praise the software's ability to handle complex planning scenarios with ease, such as building detailed driver-based models for budgeting and forecasting.
Improved Collaboration: The platform facilitates better communication and data sharing among teams, streamlining the budgeting and forecasting process.
Powerful Reporting and Analytics: Users appreciate the robust reporting features, allowing them to generate insightful reports and dashboards for data visualization and analysis.
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Limited integrations: TravelBank doesn't seamlessly integrate with all accounting systems, which can make reconciling expenses more manual and time-consuming.
Reporting limitations: Some users have expressed frustration with the platform's reporting capabilities, finding them to be somewhat inflexible for their specific accounting needs.
Occasional glitches: Like any software, TravelBank has been known to have occasional glitches or technical issues, which can be disruptive to accounting workflows.
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Steep Learning Curve: Users have reported that IBM Planning Analytics can be difficult to learn, especially for those without prior experience with similar tools. Its interface and terminology can feel overwhelming initially.
Limited Reporting Capabilities: Some users have expressed frustration with the reporting functionality within Planning Analytics, finding it less intuitive and flexible compared to dedicated reporting tools. They desire more advanced formatting and customization options for presenting financial data.
Performance Issues: Users have occasionally encountered performance issues, particularly when dealing with large datasets or complex calculations. This can slow down budgeting and forecasting processes, impacting overall productivity.
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Is TravelBank the "bank" where savvy businesses "deposit" their travel management needs? Users praise TravelBank's user-friendly design and efficient expense reimbursement process, highlighting its intuitive interface and quick turnaround times for reimbursements. The platform's ability to create and enforce custom travel policies and expense allowances is another major plus, allowing businesses to maintain control over spending while empowering employees to book travel within set parameters. Users also appreciate the 24/7 customer support, which provides peace of mind for traveling employees. However, some users have expressed concerns about the software's pricing and its limited integration with other systems, which can be a drawback for businesses relying on a suite of interconnected tools. TravelBank's focus on streamlined travel management and expense reporting makes it a strong contender in the market. Its differentiating factor lies in its comprehensive approach, combining travel booking, expense tracking, and policy enforcement in a single platform. This integrated approach simplifies travel management for both employees and administrators. While the lack of extensive third-party integrations might be a limitation for some, TravelBank's core strengths make it an ideal choice for businesses seeking a user-friendly and efficient solution for managing travel and expenses, particularly those with frequent business travelers who value a seamless and well-supported experience.

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User reviews from the past year suggest IBM Planning Analytics is a powerful tool for businesses seeking to streamline their financial planning and analysis processes. Users praise its robust features, particularly its budgeting, forecasting, and reporting capabilities. One standout feature is its ability to handle complex "what-if" scenarios, allowing businesses to model different outcomes based on various factors, which is crucial for making informed decisions in a volatile market. However, users also point out some drawbacks. The learning curve can be steep, especially for those unfamiliar with similar software. Some users find the interface less intuitive than competitors like Anaplan or Cube, and the pricing can be a significant investment for smaller businesses. Despite these weaknesses, users generally agree that IBM Planning Analytics offers a comprehensive solution for businesses needing advanced planning and analysis capabilities. Its ability to integrate with other IBM products and handle large datasets makes it particularly well-suited for larger enterprises with complex financial operations.

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