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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Wolters Kluwer CCH® Tagetik
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Tagetik is a corporate performance management solution that unifies budgeting, financial planning, consolidation and management reporting. Tagetik is offered as SaaS, on a private cloud, or on-premise, and can migrate between deployments as needed.
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.
Scenarios where CCH Tagetik is suitable is when a company have large amounts of data and want to transform, consolidate, store and produce reporting in different year, period etc with complex calculations and allocation. Tagetik is the tool for you in this case and it's very flexible in terms of creating your own business rule, calculation and reporting options with a user friendly interface. I have not thought about scenarios where it is not appropriate to use tagetik yet as the tool covers small and large business financial needs
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! 😅
Processes are clearly described in CCH Tagetik ; users can easily find where they are and which action they have to make
Interaction with Excel is really fluid ; the Excel add-in is easy to deploy and to updgrade, in the hand of users. It is reliable provided the internet connection is fast.
Managing hierachies is obvious in CCH Tagetik. Hierarchies are fundamental for a good reporting ; CCH Tagetik has obviously a deep experience of this feature.
SaaS : our experience with CCH Tagetik is of only 1 year, but it technically performs well, the system is reponsive, no shut-down, and updates (every quarter) do not disturb production.
AIH seems to be able to manage very large quantity of data, and to provide advanced analysis functionalities. We did not have time to explore them.
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.
Because in my oppinion Wolters Kluwer CCH Tagetik is one of the most usable tools for consolidation, planning (controlling) and reporting. Its usability is quite easy and innovative. I like the data entry method for the customers with its workflow and tasks, quite easy way to implement a co pilot. And i like the reporting tool, with a lot of customization opportunities.
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
Surprisingly, this platform is a powerhouse ERP system. However, given time, when more and more organization is able to identify how powerful this tool can be, CCH Tagetik is able to stand as a competitive advantage to many of the Financial industry of today. Although, it needs time to understand the logic behind how CCH Tagetik is formed and setup, once it is known to the user, it is an easy day to day operations with minimal maintenance.
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.
CCH Tagetik has alwyas been there in case we need help. In almost 20 years of commercial relationship, I have no evidence of times in which they were not available to answer a question or to solve an issue linked to their products, timely and efficiently.
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.
As you can see, speed depends on the applications but also on the hardware that runs them. As far as CCH Tagetik improved, we saw the benefit of a cloud-based solution which could solve many speed performance issues.
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 got very quick respons. After very little mail iterations, they decided to have online meeting to look together with me to the issue. They tried to solve it during the meeting. I had the impression that the customer care person really knew the system and was able to ask help from other colleagues when needed
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.
Online training is the only form of training we could deploy during the pandemic. This service has been nonethless delivered with the same standards and the same results of the traditional training procedures.
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 it in a coaching model. This allowed us to have 2 key advantages: we got to know the system very well and managed to save on the implementation cost. This worked well, was maybe a bit slower since we had to do this in our spare time. Nevertheless I strongly recommand
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 found the Excel piece of IBM Cognos TM1 to be easier to use than CCH Tagetik. It was much easier to customize the data being pulled and the feel of the reports because of that. Other than that, CCH Tagetik has been more user friendly than IBM Cognos TM1. Navigating within the application is much easier. IBM Cognos TM1 had a lot of issues with certain modules that could not be open concurrently; this would often lead to phantom data being entered in the system. I have not had these issues with CCH Tagetik.
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.
A good and performing scalability both on a geographical and a legal entity scale. The link with MS Office suite allows an easy deployment of the application, especially for contributors.
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
Gave us a tool that can absolutely grow with us to help multi phase implementations.
A significant time savings in terms of the amount of time we used to spend running reports vs. the time we spend now. Unbelievable improvement.
Gives us the option to use CCH Tagetik to solve business problems that perhaps we didn't have when we implemented CCH Tagetik. It gives us options without the possibility of implementing a whole other software package.
