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Microsoft’s growing investment in planning and write-back is good news for organizations already building around Power BI and Fabric.
It also raises a new question: if more tools can now collect an input, update a value or write data back, what makes one approach a complete planning application rather than simply another place to plan?
That distinction becomes much more important once planning moves beyond a single team or use case.
Entering a number is only the beginning. The real planning process is everything that has to happen around it: modeling the business, calculating the impact, allocating changes, managing scenarios, controlling access, coordinating contributors, approving changes and making the result available for analysis.
That’s where Acterys takes a different approach.
With Acterys, you can plan, forecast and contribute directly in Power BI and Excel, with governed write-back into Microsoft Fabric and the enterprise data your business relies on. Behind that experience is a complete planning engine and process required to carry planning beyond the input itself.
You see that difference most clearly in how planning works in real life.
Planning Should Happen Where People Analyze the Business
Planning is iterative.
A regional manager changes a forecast assumption, sees the impact, adjusts it again, compares the result and discusses it with Finance. Each round makes the forecast more reliable, so the faster a team can move from a change to its impact and back, the better the plan gets.
Fabric Planning handles that iterative process differently. Users generally enter or modify planning data in the Fabric Planning experience, navigate to a separate Power BI report to review the impact, and then return to Fabric Planning to make further adjustments. That back-and-forth becomes more noticeable as teams work through multiple scenarios and iterations.
With Acterys, that same process happens directly inside Power BI. You can change an assumption in the report, write it back into Microsoft Fabric and the governed enterprise data behind it, and immediately see the calculations, planning visuals and standard Power BI visuals respond in the same report. You can analyze the impact and adjust again without ever leaving your Power BI experience.
The Model Behind the Input Matters
Write-back answers one question: Can I save the change?
Enterprise planning has to answer many more.
What should that change do to every related product, entity, period or business unit? How should it roll up? Which allocation rule applies? Does it affect revenue, margin, cash flow, or capacity? Is the period locked? Is this the approved forecast or a what-if scenario? Who needs to review it?
Those are modeling and process questions, not simply data-entry questions.
With Acterys, governed write-back from Power BI and Excel into Microsoft Fabric and enterprise data is backed by the complete planning engine behind the input. That includes allocations, calculations, hierarchies, forecasting, versions and scenarios, workflow and approvals, permissions and audit trail.
A sales forecast, for example, shouldn’t end with the regional revenue number. The model may need to distribute the change across products and periods, translate it into operational demand and ultimately show Finance the impact on revenue, costs, margins and cash flow.
The value of a complete planning application like Acterys is in carrying that process through end-to-end, not simply collecting the original input.
One Planning Model Has to Support the Business Around It
A planning application also has to work when participation grows.
A demo with one user is easy. A real budgeting or forecasting cycle might involve anywhere from a few dozen to several hundred contributors working across regions, entities, departments and business units. They may be entering assumptions, reviewing submissions, changing drivers, adding commentary and approving plans at the same time.
Enterprise scale is about more than just user count though. It means broad participation across departments, entities, business units and use cases, while the planning model remains responsive and governed.
And volume matters too. A model holding every entity and product across every period has to stay responsive with the whole business working in it. Global planning rollouts add local currencies and legal entities on top, which Acterys handles through multi-currency, multi-entity planning and consolidation.
Acterys was built around a shared planning model: one connected foundation across regions and entities, designed to support concurrent enterprise planning while keeping the model, process and governance consistent across the business.
Improve the Process, Not Just the Input
That consistency matters beyond scale. As more teams and use cases are added, the process around the input has to hold together too.
Fabric Planning brings planning capabilities into Fabric. The question is what organizations still need to build around that experience as the planning process becomes more complex. Do teams need separate standardized import templates, validation processes or downstream planning models to carry the process forward? When those pieces remain disconnected, manual work can creep back in.
With Acterys, the planning model, business rules, validation, workflow, approvals, governance and write-back are all part of the same planning application.
That first successful planning use case and process is rarely the last.
A company might begin with sales forecasting, then expand into demand planning, workforce planning, OpEx forecasting or another operational process. With Acterys the same underlying model and infrastructure can support additional processes as the business expands its use.
Blackmores is a good example. The company introduced Acterys for demand forecasting in Power BI across 13 markets and cut demand forecast preparation time in half. It later was able to expand the same platform into OpEx forecasting and purchase price variance management.
That ability to carry the next process forward on the same planning foundation is an important part of what makes Acterys a complete enterprise planning application
Different Planning Processes Need Different Experiences
A shared planning foundation doesn’t mean every planning process should look the same. Sometimes the right experience is a planning table or a chart. Other times, users need commentary, forms, variance analysis, or a more application-like experience.
Acterys provides multiple purpose-built planning and write-back visuals that sit inside your standard Power BI reports, next to native Power BI visuals, so each process can use the experience that fits it.
As planning moves beyond Finance, a sales leader and a financial analyst may contribute to the same planning model, but that doesn’t mean they should interact with it in exactly the same way.
With Acterys the planning experience can fit the job while the underlying model, write-back, permissions and governance stay consistent.
Excel Still Belongs in Enterprise Planning
Spreadsheets remain one of the most important working environments in business, especially for Finance. Databricks made the point unusually clearly in announcing its acquisition of Row Zero, calling spreadsheets “the most broadly used analytics tool in the business world” and emphasizing their continuing role in Finance, Operations, Sales and Marketing.
Finance isn’t leaving Excel. And it shouldn’t have to.
For many Finance teams, Excel remains the right environment for detailed modeling and analysis.
With Acterys, Finance users can plan and write back through Excel while business contributors work through Power BI. Both operate against the same governed planning model and write back into the same Microsoft Fabric and enterprise data foundation.
Fabric Planning does not currently provide that same Excel write-back experience. With Acterys the interface can change without splitting the plan. Finance keeps the flexibility it values in Excel while the wider business works in Power BI.
AI Makes the Planning Layer More Important, Not Less
AI is also changing where the work sits.
As data preparation and standardization become easier to automate, the mechanics of collecting and preparing structured inputs become less differentiated.
The greater value moves to what happens after the data is collected: modeling, forecasting, allocation, collaboration, scenario analysis, governance and real-time analysis.
That’s where Acterys is applying AI as well.
Our Modeling Agent, part of the Acterys Fabric workload, analyzes an existing Power BI semantic model and recommends the planning model to build, drawing on more than a decade of Acterys modeling expertise. Once the user chooses what to keep, it builds the model and connects it to that semantic model. Our Reporting Agent then configures the reports and write-back visuals around it.
The goal isn’t just to make data entry faster; it’s to shorten the path from an existing Power BI model to a working planning application.
Experience Matters When Planning Moves into Production
There’s another difference that’s harder to capture in a feature checklist: experience running planning processes in the real world.
Enterprise planning involves more than software configuration. Organizations have to determine how models should be structured and how contributors participate, then work out approvals and security, and plan how new use cases are introduced without recreating disconnected processes.
Acterys has spent more than a decade working on these problems across enterprise planning environments and 2500+ customers. That experience informs the technology itself, and it gives Acterys implementation teams real-world practice in moving organizations from an initial use case into broader adoption.
What matters is whether the technology and the team behind it understand what happens when write-back becomes part of a real planning process.
What Acterys Brings to Enterprise Planning in Power BI and Fabric
Microsoft bringing planning capabilities into Fabric validates an important idea: planning belongs close to the governed data and analytics environment organizations already use.
Fabric Planning and Acterys can both have roles in the Microsoft environment, but they are not interchangeable.
With Acterys, planning and analysis can happen together in Power BI, Finance can continue to work in Excel against the same governed planning model, and the modeling, workflow, approvals and governance behind the process stay connected as planning expands.
As planning moves across more users, teams and use cases, a few questions become more important:
- Can users see the impact where they make the change?
- Can Finance work in Excel while the wider business works in Power BI, against the same planning model?
- Can the planning engine support the modeling, workflow, approvals and governance the process requires?
- Can the same foundation carry the next planning use case without rebuilding the process around it?
Taken together, those are the differences that make Acterys a complete enterprise planning application across Power BI, Excel and Microsoft Fabric.
See the Difference With Your Own Planning Process
The best way to evaluate any of this is not with a feature checklist.
Bring us a real planning process. Show us who contributes, where they work today, what happens after someone changes an assumption and where the process becomes difficult to manage.
We’ll show you how Acterys would approach the model and the governed process behind the user experience.
Talk to us about planning and write-back in Power BI and Fabric.
New to the evaluation? Start with our companion guide: Beyond Write-Back in Power BI and Fabric: 5 Questions to Ask Every Vendor.
