Solver review

Solver is an FP&A platform for budgeting, forecasting, financial reporting, and consolidation. It connects ERP and other business data for analysis, with a native Excel experience for building reports and working with financial information. The product description positions it as a system for planning and decision-making across an organization, rather than a standalone spreadsheet add-in.

Its main workflows cover building budgets, forecasts, and what-if models; creating financial and operational reports with drill-down; and consolidating results across companies, including currency translation and eliminations. Solver also describes a data warehouse for bringing information from multiple sources together, plus analysis tools for KPIs, ad-hoc questions, and scenario comparisons. Solver Copilot is its AI feature set: the product description lists anomaly detection, trend discovery, predictive recommendations, and AI-generated reports. The published information does not name specific ERP connectors or explain which Copilot capabilities are included in each user type.

Solver’s clearest appeal is the breadth of its stated FP&A scope. Planning, reporting, and consolidation sit in one product, so teams evaluating it can consider more than a budgeting tool or a reporting layer. Its Excel-centered approach may also suit finance teams that want to keep familiar spreadsheet workflows while working with connected data. The product description says reports can use real-time data and drill-down, and that the platform supports scenario comparisons and ad-hoc analysis.

The listed capabilities cover several common finance needs:

• Build budgets, forecasts, and what-if models for planning.
• Create financial and operational reports, with drill-down into results.
• Manage multi-company consolidation, including currency translation and eliminations.
• Bring data from multiple sources into a shared warehouse and track KPIs.
• Use Solver Copilot for anomaly detection, trend discovery, predictive recommendations, and report generation.

That breadth is useful to assess in a shortlist, but the published product information does not establish how the features perform in practice or which data connectors and AI functions are available on each user type. Those details need confirmation before treating the feature list as a fit.

The biggest buying problem is price opacity. The pricing information available for this review says Solver requires a custom quote; monthly and annual prices are not published. It lists Standard, Contributor, and Viewer user types, but no per-user rates, minimum seats, or package totals. That makes it hard to compare Solver’s cost with another FP&A platform before talking to sales. The pricing data also marks free-plan availability as no, while trial availability is not published.

The role split needs a closer look, too. Standard users can build and run reports, enter data, and manage security; Contributors enter budgets and forecasts and view published reports; Viewers view published reports and use the ad-hoc report writer. The source does not publish numeric user, data, storage, report, or entity caps, so we cannot say where those limits sit—or whether they vary by quote. No add-on prices are listed. Ask for a quote that spells out user counts, included features, implementation costs, data-source coverage, and any usage limits before comparing total cost. The AI feature list is broad, but its plan availability and any usage caps are not published.

Solver requires a custom quote; the published pricing information lists no monthly or annual prices. That means there’s no published starting price and no way to calculate the cost jump between user tiers before talking to sales.

The tiers are based on what users do, not a published feature-price ladder. Standard users build and run reports, enter data, manage security, and get Solver Academy and Solver Copilot. Contributor users enter budgets and forecasts and view published reports. Viewer users view published reports and use the ad-hoc report writer. Per the published pricing details, all three tiers have unpublished prices and units.

No free plan is listed, and trial terms are not published. The published pricing data lists no add-ons, but that does not confirm whether optional services or add-ons are available. Ask for a quote that spells out user counts by role, billing terms, and any extra costs before comparing Solver with another FP&A platform.

The published materials do not spell out migration steps, data-export options, or implementation effort. Before switching, ask Solver how it will connect your ERP and other data sources, and how it will handle existing budgets, forecasts, reports, and consolidation rules. Confirm what you can export if you leave, in what format, and whether your team can retrieve historical data without an active subscription.

Solver’s native Excel experience may suit teams whose reporting already depends on spreadsheets, but it is worth checking how existing workbooks and processes map to the platform rather than assuming they transfer unchanged. Its data warehouse and multi-company consolidation also make integration and setup questions important.

We can’t identify common reasons people leave based on Reddit: no Reddit posts or comments were included in the published material. Treat switching effort, portability, and exit terms as questions for a sales or implementation discussion, not established user complaints.