Planful is a cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM) suite. It includes financial applications for modeling, planning, consolidation, reporting and analytics.
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PowerPlan
Score 8.9 out of 10
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PowerPlan is a CPM solution focused on helping asset-intensive businesses achieve regulatory compliance.
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.
[PowerPlan is well suited for] Any Utility who handles their own Fixed Asset Accounting and Reporting. There are very few specialized solutions in this space that can handle this out of the box. Core functionality and support with PowerPlan are excellent. If you have a firm or service that handles a portion or the majority of your Fixed Asset Accounting and Reporting than this solution is overkill and costly for what you need. There may be other options also if you have a robust internal technology team that is comfortable developing another major fixed asset solution into what you need. Cloud Hosting is also not available at this time and will likely be several releases out and be a major redesign (unstable) at first.
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.
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.
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.
Oracle Financials (E-Business Suite) is a very Robust ERP solution that has better integration, reporting and functionality than PowerPlan. It also operates on a more Robust Technology Stack. The Fixed Assets Module is a great solution but lacks support for Utility Specific features and functionality, so much so that we chose PowerPlan to take over this specific functionality while still utilizing Oracle for the Majority of our Project and other Accounting Functions.
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.
