Planful is a cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM) suite. It includes financial applications for modeling, planning, consolidation, reporting and analytics.
Very well, the Hyperion module we were using was rather old, but the reporting capabilities of Planful were far ahead of anything in that version of Hyperion. Spotlight would be the one tool that would lag behind Hyperion as the excel report building in Hyperion was very easy …
Planful was a more cost effective approach vs our previous platform (Adaptive) and is able to be managed fully within the FP&A team (no IT resources or outside consultants post-implementation)
Sr. Financial Analyst/ Planful System Administrator
Chose Planful
We felt the platform was more user-friendly and had better functionality for our purposes. Since we already had Planful instance within our company, we already had in-house expertise on the Planful system, which gave us some consistency in tools.
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. …
We have only used custom-built Excel interfaces for our financials and workforce planning in the past. As stated earlier in my review, Planful has grouped all of this into a fantastic program that is easy to use, easily manipulated to match our needs and we have been very happy …
Planful seems to have the best price to performance option against the tools listed. Some of the more premium options on the market have outdated UIs and dont get updated as frequently and other in the same price category dont seem to have the same level of options and "ease" …
Ease of use, integrations, price, and excel compatibility were the driving factors behind getting off of Adaptive and selecting Planful over these other competitors
I wasn't here when we transitioned to Planful, but I would imagine the reason, based off of what I've heard in the past, is because of how dynamic and interactive it is across multiple sheets at the same time. I can't imagine trying to link a bunch of Excel sheets together - …
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 …
They all have pretty similar functionality, I liked Planful because it was all cloud-based and we didn't have to buy a bunch of hardware. Spotlight dynamic planning I felt was the most versatile available at the time, not sure if it still is, and I liked the idea of building …
Not sure if this was specific to our specific BPC configuration, but here are a few major issues we had with that system that have since been resolved switching to Planful (formerly Host Analytics): It was painfully slow to load new data into the system (3+ hours for new GL …
Against other financial planning software systems, Planful allows the greatest financial visibility. While the same data may be housed in other financial planning software systems the functionality of the Planful reporting module and dashboard modules makes visualizing, …
Planful is the first FP&A specific software I have used. However, the dashboard module can be compared to PowerBI as I use both - with regard to dashboards, PowerBI offers much more control and customization not only with data manipulation, but also with visualizations and …
We use Sage Intacct for our Accounting ERP but found that their budgeting and reporting tool would not grow with our company. We had to find something that could accommodate large growth and be able to pull in data from different systems to get the right answer. We weren't able …
Besides Planful, I have experience with Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning. While SIBP could be perfectly fine for a company already on Sage Intacct and with higher level budgeting needs, I'd say Planful is a more versatile software to work with because of how the data can be …
Planful is lightyears better than Adaptive in the way it allows you to customize and do things on your own. It doesn't use it's own formula language so it's very intuitive for average Excel users.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
