Likelihood to Recommend Board is a useful tool with a great set of features. We migrated from human apps to board and we find it relatively fast in search results and better-managed threads and forums. There are some areas, such as UI and interactions which could be improved but overall a great product. The learning section is also pretty good.
Read full review Planful makes it very easy to roll forward forecasts and conduct scenario analyses. I'm also a big fan of their reporting and how easy it is to distribute a report burst to satisfy all the needs and questions of our SLT. Lastly, their latest developments in the AI space make it easy to quickly identify outlier projections.
Read full review Pros The user interface is intuitive and easy to navigate You don't need programming knowledge to create dashboards which is a great flex for non-technical users You can seamlessly convert large, raw, and complex data to meaningful reports to visualize better and plan to act accordingly The financial forecasting that Board provides post-analysis is truly reliable Read full review Creating forecasts for the month, quarter, and year Creating new variables by using variables pre-defined and that are new in the system Having a very simple setup in the reports section - not straying away from the old Excel model which most people are used to. I can speak for a lot of people when I say that tools that look new can easily be frightening! 😅 Read full review Cons Board BI tool has a steep learning curve and can be challenging for a new user to reach to board's full capacity. We have to use a windows scheduler to schedule data import tasks; it would be great if Board could provide its own scheduler. Read full review Multiple currency calculations/ consolidations support IFRS accounting Ability to inactivate old data dimensions Reporting - Need ability to expand all/collapse all lines easily Reporting - Formula exceptions added to a report do not update when information is revised. Automatic Sandbox refreshes initiated by Planful - When Planful does an automatic refresh of the sandbox environment, it copies any Boomi/integration connections. Limited to 8 data dimensions in core application Add more API connectors to make data integration easier ability to transfer sandbox tests to production environment Jean Dane Sr. Financial Analyst/ Planful System Administrator
Read full review Likelihood to Renew Board is a fantastic product for swift BI solution delivery when compared with its peers. Ease of use, support and integration with Microsoft Office Addin open a wide horizon of opportunities for further enhancements to solutions. Easy bespoke app development capabilities make it a winner for us. BOARD is just like a white canvas, it lets you explore your creative side while designing and delivering a solution
Gaurav Suri Finance Business Partner - Business Intelligence Developer
Read full review Our new Comptroller understands the value of Planful, and we plan to utilize it further in the organization to enhance external reporting. Strangely enough, Planful had not previously been embraced by the former CFO, who argued that we were running two sets of books (of course, we were not). Fortunately, the before mentioned reconciliation of EBITDA to Net Income demonstrated that to the banks.
Read full review Usability From a user perspective, Board is quite simple to use. You can evaluate the presentation of the data, the navigation, the configuration of the users, the selection of the data etc ... It would have a better rating if it were even more intuitive as regards the construction of a project, starting from the database, to the info-cubes, to entities, to data acquisition procedures from other servers.
Read full review Planful is very easy to use for end users. The budget templates can be customized to meet the business needs. They just released business user experience functionality which you to take a complicated budget template and filter it down to meet departmental needs to avoid sending more lines than needed
Read full review Reliability and Availability I only give a 9 rating rather than a 10 rating because it seems that every day around 2pm we see a slowdown in the use of Planful. I have requested our internal IT department verify that it is not an internal issue and have been assured it is the tool. We have not yet reached out to Planful to do extensive research to solve this issue.
Read full review Performance very fast and no integration problems
Read full review Again, the system is very reliable and, for the most part, runs very quick and smooth. When running larger queries, it does take some time, and during budgeting season our users experienced slower loading times, but nothing that raises concerns outside of normal network issues. Occasionally, as with any software we use, it will crash and you have to restart, but that does not happen very often.
Read full review Support Rating The only time I needed assistance was due to a problem in the prints: the colors of the brochures as they were on the screen were not reproduced in the print, but a series of standard colors were reproduced. This fact made colored numbers on a colored background illegible. From the assistance they confirmed that it was a problem of version 10.2 that occurred when leaving the brochures with the default colors proposed by Board. To obtain the desired colors, they had to be personalized ... I didn't like the solution very much and the technician who recommended it didn't like me either, but they would have solved the problem with the following versions. In any case, the assistance was quick and effective even if not exactly efficient.
Read full review Sometimes we get great help when using Planful's support team and other times we don't. In particular, there is one person that often responds to our support tickets who is less than helpful, hence the reason for the 5 out of 10 rating. As a result, most of the time we reach out to our Planful consulting group as they provide faster and better support
Read full review In-Person Training Board is fairly simple and straight forward. Advance training on workflows and procedures is a good one but the training content only touches through the interesting areas. training content needs to cover a few areas more in-depth
Gaurav Suri Finance Business Partner - Business Intelligence Developer
Read full review We got little training on the tool after implementation. Did a lot of "trial by fire" learning about Planful. I don't think RSM really provided us all the details we needed to understand the tool and to know what we needed to train on. I don't know we knew enough about the tool to even ask the right questions and then they left and we used Planful support a lot.
Read full review Online Training A few years ago I participated in a lot of their online learning. Their references have grown over the years and continue to get better and better. We use it throughout the year to update the information we hold internally for documentation and to educate ourselves on all of the new release notes and features within Planful.
Read full review Implementation Rating The problem of user profiling in our context is certainly quite complex. The complexity is given by the fact that the company is divided territorially into logistic points of sale, but at the same time they are virtually divided into divisions (or specific implementation areas) and points of sale of competence. The same operator can have access to data at different logistic sales points, sales points of competence and divisions.
Read full review After going through the initial implementation with Host Analytics and a re-implementation with Cervello (due to an ERP change, not due to a poor initial implementation), I've learned that you really must rely on your internal staff to bear most of the implementation burden. Use the vendor or partners for ideas and best-practice suggestions, and some of the easy-but-time-consuming work. Since you will ultimately be using and maintaining the application, you should be able to do most of it yourself.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Board has been more complete when compared to
Anaplan . Although I didn't participate in the buying decision of any of those products I have used both and by far Board just has more features. It's more than a CPM, it's BI and CPM put together. If I had to make a choice now it would be Board.
Read full review Planful seems to do a better job of pulling things in a format that is more understandable to an accounting-minded person, whereas the other platforms seem more focused on operations. From a detail perspective, Planful provides more powerful and complete data, in my experience. When using a platform for financial planning and budgeting, the details are critical and the ability to match the GL structure and pull full P&L data has been a big improvement from Qlik, which we used previously.
Read full review Scalability I give this rating simply because I have first-hand knowledge of the scalability of Planful when working across departments in our company that use different financial systems. We have one team on InEight and another using SAP. When we implemented it, we only customized the system to accommodate one of these financial platforms, but when we considered expanding the use of Planful to other departments, we were able to make the necessary adjustments to accommodate our needs.
Read full review Return on Investment Board facilitates proactive decision making - it gives all the insights of the company's needs, which includes predictive analytics and manipulation of data to make different types of reports. Easy to use for non-programmer and integration with other software is seamless. It has [the] ability to handle large amounts of data. It facilitates advanced decision-making. Read full review We have saved a large amount of time on reports that we previously manually compiled in Excel via MS Dynamics. Planful was linked to Dynamics through automatically scheduled DLR's, reports were created, and now our manual processes are as simple as accessing and refreshing a report. Dashboards have improved our budgeting process specifically with our production leaders as they can visualize their P&L's, their current actuals, current budget, and see where they are forecasting with their proposed budget for the next year With the use of templates, structured planning, and the Simulation Engine, it has added a lot of value and automation to our annual budget process, allowing for plug-and-play type data loading and viewing various scenarios easily Read full review ScreenShots