LivePlan is business plan software for entrepreneurs. Features include the pitch creation, sample plans, financial assessments, and performance dashboards.
$15
Monthly & Annual billing options available
Planful
Score 8.6 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.
N/A
Pricing
LivePlan
Planful
Editions & Modules
LivePlan Premium
Starting at $30/month
Monthly & Annual billing options available
LivePlan Standard
Starting at $15/month
Monthly & Annual billing options available
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
LivePlan
Planful
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
LivePlan Standard Includes:
- Step-By-Step Instructions
- Automatic Financial Statements
- Full Financial Forecast
- One-Page Pitch Builder
- 500+ Sample Plans
LivePlan Premium includes everything in Standard, plus:
- Industry Benchmark Data
- Financial Forecast Scenarios
- Performance Dashboards
- Milestone Planner
- LiveForecast
- Syncs with Xero & QuickBooks
All subscriptions come with a 60-day money-back guarantee and access to expert customer support.
All businesses require solutions and tools for organization and control of expenses, spreadsheets were always the first option, but since the arrival of LivePlan, all work is easier and more automated. With LivePlan we have charts and graphs that are automatically created based on our data, this is a great time and money saver. LivePlan is a tool that has worked from day one and has met our expectations in creating the total budget.
Scenarios where it would be well-suited: - Creating actual versus planned dashboards for budgetary and FP&A purposes - Exporting or creating reports to examine vendor details, KPIs by a certain parameter, etc. Scenarios where it is less appropriate: - Creating very very intricate charts and graphs - I use Tableau for this if I want to easily interact with charts and tables - Linking it to a database and making it more "alive" - for instance, in Tableau, I connect that to a database. I can't tell you how many times I've wished that I could do this with Planful.
User security control could be more centralized on the platform, where you may need to navigate to multiple screens to ensure the access granted is what it should be, depending on your system setup.
Dynamic planning (while certainly powerful and can help fulfill special use cases) does have more of a learning curve vs. other areas of Planful, especially if you are not using it frequently. That being said, Planful does have training and resources to help acquire that knowledge.
Out-of-the-box intercompany reporting in the consolidation module can be tricky depending on how balances are booked in local source systems. Building reports using the intercompany dimension can be challenging depending on your specific company (entity) structure, but it can be done with some testing and validation.
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.
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
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.
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
I have made a point to attend the Planful Perform conference and it, by far, offers so much more information than "other conferences". Planful does an amazing job including their customers (other users) in their conference to ensure their customers are getting the most out of the information provided. It is truly a wonderful LEARNING experience for their customers!
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.
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.
We did not really find a similar solution. All other solutions are focused on project management, [there's] nothing on generating a business plan. There is nothing on this level that helps people without any business experience write the plan. They have samples, instructions what to write where, how to prepare for pitching, and generate dashboards. Nothing in this market gets anywhere close to this solution.
Planful is nice for the reporting option. SAP Concur doesn't so much have an option where you can see physical reports. You can easily report on the tool and send reimbursement requests and such, but you have to use multiple tools if you use Concur and want to see any sort of account history and/or detailed report information.
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.
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
