Centage (Planning Maestro) offers a way to plan, budget, forecast and report financial performance by enabling finance teams
to see into the future, and test the impact of different scenarios, in order to make faster decisions with confidence. The software streamlines the entire planning process, delivering sophisticated financial intelligence to empowers users to make faster, more informed decisions, so they can react quickly to market changes, take intelligent risks and
capitalize on new…
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Planful
Score 7.7 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Planful is a cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM) suite. It includes financial applications for modeling, planning, consolidation, reporting and analytics.
I used Prophix at a previous company, although more as a user than an administrator. Budget expense templates in Host Analytics can mirror what we used in Prophix. Better than that, though, we use "drivers" to move expenses based on revenue, headcount, etc., which I don't know …
The primary reason for choosing Host Analytics Cloud EPM Suite was their plan for implementation and ensuring we understand the build of our system and how the pieces work together. Their concept of making the user an expert in the foundation and use of the system ensures you …
Centage is suited for all types of business. This is what makes this tool so great. It requires some expertise in setting it up and depending on how complex the business is, it may take longer than expected. It's a complex system and if you are not involved in the implementtion it might be hard to learn what is does.
Planful has become a key tool for all our financial processes, from reporting and budgeting to handling ad-hoc requests. It provides a centralized solution for our company. We've spent some time building dashboards in Planful, however, we already have a strong PowerBI presence at our company. So we've found that PowerBI is the more flexible & advanced tool for visualizations.
Planning personnel with all the related benefit expenses is very accurate and we are able to forecast increases as well.
Storing separate versions of the budget allows us to finalize for the year and have access to the data while we update the default plan with any changes.
I ilke the way you can add intelligence see the detail of calculations below th eline item.
I like writing Planning Maestro reports to see drill downs of any item and tie them to our ERP Budget
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! 😅
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
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.
The tool is extremely adaptable, and it enables very quick querying to give us opportunity to gain live insights into the business. Given its adaptability, we are also able to create scenario analyses very quickly in rapidly changing environments. The formatting also enables us to provide this information in a very consumable manner.
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.
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.
The team makes sure that you get what you need out of the software. They will do whatever is in their power to make sure you're happy and are getting back your investment (time and money).
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
My team has attended training offered several times before/during the Planful Perform conference. This training has been extremely useful and we always learn something we didn't know prior to the training. The trainers are always very knowledgeable and more than willing to help each and every user after the training with specific questions regarding their environment.
This training is much more robust now than it was when we first implemented our Planful environment. Many times we can do a little research in the "help" portal and do not even need to reach out to support. They are continuously improving the training and information available to users.
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.
I used to use an older consolidating product call FRX or something like that, very manual where accounts were adding line the reporting lines one by one.... Centage is far superior, the ability to create custom Dimension hierarchies as improved our reporting 100 fold
Workforce Planning in Planful is a plus compared to Adaptive Insights. Reporting in Planful is a plus compared to Adaptive Insights. Similarity to Excel is a plus compared to Adaptive Insights. Adaptive Insights can budget/forecast weekly or daily rather easily, which is a huge undertaking in Planful. Adaptive Insights has a larger user base and can more easily find talents in Consulting or general users.
From our experience, Planful is only used in 2 overhead departments in our organization. We easily added another overhead department, but they decided against using Planful for their workforce and financial planning. Removing them from our environment was extremely easy.
We were a very small company growing by acquisition so it worked well during these phases of our company growth.
The return for our cost was tremendous especially in comparison to peers in the market.
Analytics Maestro allowed us to grow without adding headcount by building efficient reports that can easily be mass-produced for all branches within our organization.
