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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ReconNET by Trintech
Score 10.0 out of 10
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ReconNET is a corporate performance management solution from Trintech. ReconNET automates account reconciliation, including high-volume reconciliation, with the goal of helping users tighten controls, reduce risk and increase process efficiency.
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.
It is well suited in scenarios where customers have tremendous volumes of data to deal with and where the reconciliation of the information is of paramount importance to businesses and stakeholders. We use it primarily for balance sheet reconciliations that come with features, such as exception management, which is great for focusing on the few that matter the most at the end of the day.
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! 😅
The ReconNET tool has a great audit-trial system that captures every detail in the life of a record and helps eliminate any manual intervention. It's fully SOX Compliant, and helps track any changes in the data from an audit perspective.
The automation helps us focus entirely on the exceptions, which helps eliminate attention from the mundane tasks to areas with potential problems.
Exception management and automated posting to the GL are great features that help streamline many of the routine, mundane, and yet time-consuming activities, freeing up time to focus on issues at hand.
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
It takes a little bit of practice to get the hang of the tool to set up the reconciliations, but its not necessarily a drawback, since this applies to every other automation tool out there. However, once someone gets the hang of it, it's pretty user-friendly to run it on a daily basis.
Since automatons can only be built on a set logic, at times certain items that show up as exceptions are not truly a cause of concern. However, since it's always better to flag too many potential exceptions than too few, it's not a true drawback.
It has quite a few features, such as multi-currency reconciliation, bank deposits, disbursements, automated postings to G/L, etc. which could be of great value for various requirements for clients. It is especially useful where volumes of data are too large to deal with. The uses might not be phenomenal for low volume reconciliation requirements.
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.
Each automation tool has its own set of features, but the fact that ReconNET is built for reconciliation purposes sets it apart from the rest. The ease of usage once the user gets a hang of it, the extensive audit trial, and the ability to focus on exceptions rather than the necessity to scroll through a bulk of irrelevant information, all provide the key-user with the critical decision-making ability.
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
It definitely has a positive impact on ROI with freeing up resource availability and usage on the most pressing tasks at hand. For example, focusing on exceptions rather than reconciling from scratch.
Another positive impact on the ROI can be realized with the detailed audit trials on sensitive information.
Strong Financial Reporting is the backbone of any industry, regardless of the sector it operates in, and having an automated reconciliation tool such as ReconNET helps you attain the key objective of integrity of information in a timely fashion, to support the close process.
