10 Signs Your Anaplan Model Needs an Audit

Your Anaplan implementation cost six figures. It took months to deploy. And somewhere along the way, it stopped being the solution and started being the problem.

You’re not alone. We’ve run Anaplan model audits for organisations ranging from 100-person digital marketplaces to 50,000-employee global enterprises. The pattern repeats with uncomfortable regularity: platforms that promised agility now deliver frustration. Models that should speed up decisions now slow them down.

The frustrating part? Most of these issues stem from model design choices, not the platform itself. With focused work, organisations can often extend their workspace capacity without buying more allocation. But first, you need to spot the warning signs.

Here are ten indicators that your Anaplan implementation needs professional attention. If more than three apply to you, it’s time for a serious conversation.

1. Your calculations take longer than your coffee break

Slow calculation times are the canary in the coal mine. When a model that used to refresh in seconds now takes minutes, something has gone wrong beneath the surface.

The causes vary. Sometimes it’s dimensionality creep, where each new dimension multiplies cell count exponentially. Sometimes it’s circular references that force the calculation engine into repeated passes. Sometimes it’s simply that nobody ever archived the test modules from the original implementation.

One symptom we see repeatedly: models containing granularity that serves no planning purpose. Weekly detail exists, but planning happens monthly. That weekly dimension wastes capacity without adding value. A UK digital marketplace we worked with had exactly this problem. Manual processing that should have taken days was consuming two weeks per cycle. Suboptimal model design forced workarounds that compounded over time.

The fix isn’t always obvious from inside. When you’ve been working in a model for months, you stop seeing the inefficiencies. You adapt to the slowness. You build workarounds. And those workarounds create new problems.

2. Documentation exists only in someone’s head

Here’s a question that should make you uncomfortable: if your primary Anaplan builder left tomorrow, how long would it take someone else to understand the models?

We worked with a 5,000-person cybersecurity company where less than 30% of models had adequate documentation. Different teams used different naming conventions. Different modelling approaches. When models broke, diagnosis took hours because nobody could trace the logic without the original builder present.

“Critical knowledge held by individuals creates business continuity risk.”

This isn’t about creating bureaucracy. It’s about recognising that undocumented models are technical debt with interest that compounds. Every month without documentation increases the cost of eventual maintenance. Every departure of a key team member creates a crisis.

After implementing proper governance frameworks, that cybersecurity company increased documentation coverage from 30% to 95%. Issue resolution time dropped by 60%. Not because the platform changed, but because people could finally understand what they were looking at.

3. Your FP&A team has become a bottleneck for basic questions

Business users should be able to answer their own questions. That’s the promise of self-service analytics. That’s why you invested in Anaplan in the first place.

But something went wrong. Now every variance analysis requires FP&A intervention. Every ad-hoc report needs a specialist. Your planning team has become a ticket queue instead of a strategic function.

The digital marketplace we mentioned earlier had this exact problem. Business users couldn’t answer their own questions without FP&A support. The platform had capabilities that weren’t being used. The architecture had drifted from documented standards in ways that locked users out of self-service.

After optimisation, those same business users could self-serve many reporting needs that previously required FP&A intervention. The platform didn’t change. The models did.

4. You’ve hit workspace capacity warnings

Anaplan workspaces have defined capacity limits. As organisations add users, extend planning horizons, and incorporate new business dimensions, they consume this capacity progressively. Eventually, you hit the wall.

Warning signs include slower calculation times, delayed data loads, and ultimately hard stops when workspace allocation is exhausted. Addressing these issues reactively is far more disruptive than proactive work.

The good news: most capacity issues can be resolved without purchasing additional allocation. The approaches are straightforward but require systematic attention.

Regular model reviews can identify and remove obsolete modules and line items that no longer serve the planning framework. Archiving historical models preserves audit trails while freeing active workspace. Quarterly reviews prevent accumulation of redundant elements.

Subset functions on General Lists restrict items to only relevant selections, reducing unnecessary cell creation. Central system modules for mappings and reusable operations reduce duplication across models. This approach reduces maintenance burden while conserving space.

None of this is new. But it requires someone to actually do it, systematically, with the authority to make changes.

5. Manual workarounds have crept back in

You implemented Anaplan to eliminate spreadsheet chaos. But look at your actual process. How many steps happen outside the platform? How many exports to Excel for “just a quick adjustment”? How many manual uploads that “only take a few minutes”?

Manual workarounds are symptoms, not causes. They emerge when the model doesn’t fit the business process. When a calculation is too slow. When a dimension is missing. When someone needed a quick fix eighteen months ago and the quick fix became permanent.

The digital marketplace reduced manual processing from two weeks to three days per cycle. Not by working harder, but by eliminating the workarounds that had accumulated over years of “just this once” decisions.

An Anaplan model audit reveals these workarounds. More importantly, it reveals why they exist, which tells you what needs to change in the underlying architecture.

6. Your model architecture doesn’t match your business anymore

Businesses change. Acquisitions happen. Product lines expand. Organisational structures shift. But Anaplan models often remain frozen in the moment of their creation.

The result is a growing gap between how the model thinks your business works and how it actually works. Dimensions that made sense three years ago now force awkward mappings. Hierarchies that reflected the old org chart create confusion under the new one.

This drift happens gradually. Nobody notices until someone asks why the regional breakdown doesn’t match the current sales territories. Or why the product categories include lines that were discontinued two years ago.

Reviewing model architecture against current business reality is a core component of any serious Anaplan model audit. Sometimes the fix is simple: updating list members, adjusting hierarchies. Sometimes it requires more fundamental restructuring. But ignoring the drift only makes eventual correction more painful.

7. Different teams have built different standards

Organic growth creates inconsistency. Team A builds a model using one naming convention. Team B builds another model using different conventions. Neither is wrong, exactly. But when someone needs to work across both models, the cognitive load multiplies.

The cybersecurity company we worked with had exactly this problem. Years of organic Anaplan growth had created a governance gap. Models were undocumented. Standards varied across teams. When issues arose, resolution was slow due to lack of clear ownership.

Establishing an Anaplan Centre of Excellence addressed this systematically. Defined roles, responsibilities, and decision rights for the platform. Naming conventions and modelling standards that applied across teams. Change management procedures that prevented future drift.

The governance framework became embedded in how the organisation manages its planning platform. It reduced risk and improved efficiency not through technology, but through clarity about how technology should be used.

8. You’re not using features you’re paying for

Anaplan is expensive. The licensing model means you’re paying for capabilities whether you use them or not. And most organisations use perhaps 40% of what they’ve purchased.

Sometimes this is fine. Not every feature suits every business. But often it represents missed opportunity. Capabilities that could eliminate manual work sit unused because nobody knew they existed. Or because the original implementation didn’t include them. Or because the team that understood them has moved on.

The digital marketplace improved from “medium” to “good” on maturity simply by putting platform capabilities to work that had been sitting idle. The features were already there. The licensing was already paid. The value was just waiting.

An Anaplan model audit identifies these gaps between what you’re paying for and what you’re actually using. Sometimes the answer is to use more features. Sometimes it’s to reduce your licensing tier. Either way, you should make that decision consciously.

9. Issue resolution takes longer than it should

When something breaks, how long does it take to fix? Hours? Days? Weeks?

The answer depends less on the complexity of the issue than on the clarity of ownership and documentation. If you know who owns the model, where the documentation lives, and what the dependencies are, most issues resolve quickly. If you don’t, every incident becomes an archaeology project.

The cybersecurity company reduced issue resolution time by 60% through better documentation and clear ownership. The issues didn’t become simpler. The path to resolution became shorter.

Structured issue logging, triage, and resolution processes sound bureaucratic. They’re not. They’re the difference between a platform that supports the business and a platform that creates anxiety every time something unexpected happens.

10. You’ve stopped trusting the numbers

This is the final warning sign, and the most serious. When finance leaders start double-checking Anaplan outputs in Excel “just to be sure,” something fundamental has broken.

Trust erodes gradually. A calculation that seemed off once. A variance that didn’t make sense. A report that contradicted what everyone knew to be true. Each incident chips away at confidence until the platform becomes something to verify instead of something to rely on.

Rebuilding trust requires understanding why it was lost. Sometimes the numbers were actually wrong, due to logic errors, stale data, or broken integrations. Sometimes the numbers were right but poorly explained, missing the context that would make them meaningful. Sometimes the issue was presentation, not calculation.

An Anaplan model audit surfaces these trust issues and traces them to root causes. The fix might be technical. It might be about communication. It might be about training. But you can’t fix what you haven’t diagnosed.

What happens next

If you recognised your organisation in three or more of these signs, you have a choice. Continue adapting to a platform that’s working against you. Or invest in understanding why it’s not working and what would make it work better.

The organisations we’ve helped through this process consistently find that most limitations stem from design choices, not platform constraints. The 5,000-person cybersecurity company didn’t need a new platform. They needed governance, documentation, and clear ownership. The digital marketplace didn’t need more Anaplan licenses. They needed optimised architecture and users who could actually do their own reporting.

Sometimes the most impactful changes are ones internal teams have stopped seeing. Familiarity obscures what an outside perspective reveals immediately.

Most organisations paying enterprise Anaplan licensing would benefit from an audit. The question is whether you act now or wait until the next crisis forces the conversation.

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