In as much detail as possible, describe the problem or experience related to your idea. Please provide the context of what you were trying to do and include specific examples or workarounds:
We have multiple legal entities, and each entity contains the same set of functional departments (HR, Finance, IT, Administration, Marketing, etc.). After the planning cycle, C‑suite users need to review the submitted budgets. However, they do not review using the standard planning hierarchy; instead, each executive only reviews data that falls within their functional remit across all entities. For example, the CIO should only see IT department data for all entities, the Marketing Director should only see Marketing data for all entities, and HR leadership should see staff cost accounts across all departments and entities.
To support this, we have already built a dedicated security/control module in the anaplan model that defines read/write access by department and account for each “reporting group” (e.g., IT, HR, Marketing). This module effectively centralizes which intersections (entity × department × account) each functional owner is allowed to see or edit.
The challenge is when we bring this data into AnaplanXL Add‑in reports: We want the row set in Excel (e.g., departments, cost centers, accounts) to dynamically reflect the same access rules, so that when the admin user (who have access to all Accounts, Depts, and reporting groups) use Anaplan XL's "propagate across sheets" function to generate report for each reporting group (some user don't have anaplan license and they will view the offline report). The generated excel report should only show the rows relevant to the reporting group.
Currently, we do not have a native way to directly apply these access filters from the security module to the XL Add‑in views. As a result, every user sees the full set of departments/accounts (they see the member name only, no access to the data) unless we manually create separate saved views or separate reports per role, which is difficult to maintain and does not scale.
A workaround would be to create multiple saved views in the model (one per function, such as IT‑only, Marketing‑only, HR‑only) and then build separate Excel reports off each view. However, this increases maintenance effort significantly, especially when structures or filters change, and it does not provide a truly user‑specific, security‑driven filtering experience in Excel.
How often is this impacting your users?
This impacts users every planning and review cycle, especially during budget review and adjustment periods when C‑suite and senior leaders frequently use Excel reports for analysis, validation, and discussion. During peak periods, this can be a daily issue for multiple users across functions.
Who is this impacting? (ex. model builders, solution architects, partners, admins, integration experts, business/end users, executive-level business users)
- Model builders and solution architects, who must design and maintain multiple role‑specific views or reports as a workaround.
- Administrators, who need to manage security and ensure consistency between model access and XL report visibility.
- Business/end users in functional leadership roles (e.g., HR, IT, Marketing, Finance leads) who consume Excel reports.
- Executive‑level business users (CIO, CHRO, CMO, CFO, etc.) who expect to see only their own functional scope but currently may be exposed to irrelevant or excessive detail unless separate reports are maintained.
What would your ideal solution be? How would it add value to your current experience?
The ideal solution would allow the Anaplan Excel Add‑in to natively respect and apply model‑level access filters (e.g., selective access, Dynamic Cell Access, or user‑specific filter modules) at the row level. The add‑in would automatically:
- Apply the correct filters based on the boolean line (the access control module) so that only departments/accounts within that reporting group's defined remit appear as rows.
- Reduce the need for multiple saved views and separate Excel report definitions per function.
Please include any images to help illustrate your experience.
We could illustrate this with:
- A screenshot of the security/control module showing how access is defined by reporting group (IT, HR, Marketing) against department and account.
- Screenshots showing the steps to "Propagate across sheets" using the Anaplan XL template.
- Screenshots showing Excel report where all departments and accounts are currently visible to all users.
Access Control Table
Propagate across sheets (Step 1)
Propagate across sheets (Step 2)
Report (Output) for HR Reporting Group
Report (Output) for IT Reporting Group
