Spreadsheets are widely used for planning because of their flexibility and familiarity. With OnPlan, users get access to visualization capabilities, integrations, and collaboration features, in a solution designed to give the run-of-the-mill spreadsheet model more power. OnPlan integrates with dozens of data sources, including Netsuite, Quickbooks, Salesforce, ADP, and also existing spreadsheets – allowing the user to make important business decisions leveraging a single source of…
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Planful
Score 8.1 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.
OnPlan is well suited for finance teams looking to maintain control of their corporate/financial models. Every model can be exported to Excel. In particular, for early-stage to mid-stage companies, OnPlan provides a powerful and inexpensive solution that allows for automation and customization. Another strong argument for OnPlan is their experienced CSM/IM team that helps to build the first model and acts as a sounding board with insights to improve the models. OnPlan might be less powerful for large organizations operating across multiple divisions, countries, and entities as this requires sophisticated consolidation processes and standardization, which might be difficult to maintain with OnPlan. Implementations depending on complexity can take longer due to the customization options and plethora of options to make models more accurate.
I think it is a useful tool from a reporting standpoint. It does a good job of data aggregation from different sources, even if slow at times. I think the tools for building forecasting and budgeting templates are straight forward but allow for a level of complexity that make it both easy to use but also allow for complex builds so that our models can take into account many different variables that drive our daily performance.
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! 😅
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.
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.
Prior to joining the company, we tried to implement Vena but were unsuccessful. There we're a few reasons it didn't work out, but a lot of it related to the implementation team they provided. In just the first week with Planful, we achieved more progress than we did in several months with Vena.
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.
