Planful is a cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM) suite. It includes financial applications for modeling, planning, consolidation, reporting and analytics.
$0
per year per user
Visual Studio Test Professional
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
An add-on for the Visual Studio IDE, Visual Studio Test Professional subscription helps teams drive quality and speed. It includes test case management and collaboration features that streamline quality control and support continuous delivery.
$2,169
for the first year (renews at $869)
Pricing
Planful
Visual Studio Test Professional
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Pricing Offerings
Planful
Visual Studio Test Professional
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
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No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
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No setup fee
Additional Details
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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.
It would be well suited if we used it with Azure DevOps as we can effortlessly integrate the test cases and even stories or tasks to stay on track with our work. Those test cases can even be reused across multiple projects. Using any other third-party tools, such as Jira, can be less appropriate, as it's not a Microsoft tool, and its capabilities will be limited.
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 user community of the Visual Studio Test product is weak. For instant problems with this product, it is necessary to quickly reach the source of the error.
Licence fees need to be more reasonable. License prices need to be reduced so that they can easily compete with free testing tools.
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.
It is very usable if you are familiar with Visual Studio to begin with. If you are new to the interface, it can be a long ramp up period for Testers not used to the GUI. There is always the web option which seems to be more intuitive for many Testers.
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
Visual Studio Test Professional is backed up by the full support of the Microsoft Corporation. That means twenty-four/seven customer support by quality, highly-trained professionals who understand every possible issue that you have experienced before. They are nice, efficient, and highly professional. I recommend them.
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.
Planful provides a lot of online training support. There's so many options for training. Admin Learning Courses, User Learning Courses. Plus they have several webinars devoted to the tool and the new features they release. New Releases can be practiced in a Sandbox Environment prior to going live in Production
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.
The visual Studio Test tool is faster than other tools. Since the development and testing processes are in one tool, it is more profitable in terms of cost. It is more inconvenient to write a test case in DevOps.
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.
One of the positive ROIs of Visual Studios is the fact that it makes producing our work at a quick rate, things like Intellisense make our work get produced at a much higher rate which is good for our return of investment.
Testing by the developers has increased by 23%, we now take the time to actually test our product before we send it to our QA people.
I am not aware of any negative ROI aspects to our company that have been found.
