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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Prophix
Score 8.5 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Prophix One, a Financial Performance Platform, is used to improve the speed and accuracy of decision-making within a harmonized user experience. To reduce complexity and uncertainty, the software offers automated insights and planning, budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and consolidation functionalities.
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Pricing
Planful
Prophix
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Planful
Prophix
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Required
Optional
Additional Details
Pricing is highly dependent on the complexity and scope of the implementation.
Planful solved our problem (avoid manual data entry) with competitive pricing. Data rails and Anaplan were expensive for a pre-revenue biopharma company.
Mosaic was very rigid and not flexible for our needs. It was difficult to manage and not user friendly. Planful allows us to customize various fields that allows for more robust and efficient reporting. The user interface is easy to digest and use. The Planful team is also a …
Planful is one of the best solutions because of its easy of reporting capabilities that a business user can develop without consulting assistance. The other tools I have used require a more technical base knowledge.
This was the most cost effective for the features our business needed. Centage and Microsoft's PowerBI did not offer everything we wanted. One Stream was a good alternative but very expensive for what our business needed.
EPM tools are all pretty close in general functionality in that they are tables of your data with a finance focused UI stacked on top. The last 5% is what the difference. Planful has a very modern UI and does a great job of updating the system over time, including things like …
Planful was great for its price point. Although workday and hyperion are the more popular bunch, our use case is mostly met through Planful's functionality.
Personally I have only used essbase in my work. Planful has a much easier platform to use both to put together results and to load data compared to the financial reporting platforms that I have used. Planful also has better dedicated tools to create reports and build in a …
We enjoy planful and have preferred it compared to similar products because of the personability, helpfulness form customer service, easy sign on, ability to customize reports, and run easy consolidation process.
Most financial folks user-friendly less technical support needed; most efficient and automated; data host in US; most automated with both the core application and excel spotlight in sync, you can view and sync in web or excel. Process time is fast.
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 …
Planful's user interface is much more user-friendly than OneSteam. I wasn't as heavy of a Onestream user as Planful so can't fully compare. I am Power User and building system for Planful whereas I was purely end user for Onestream.
We liked the Excel-based interface and Planful's reporting capabilities. The dashboarding feature also offers a visual look at KPIs without purchasing another software, saving the company money.
We previously used Spreadsheet Server to get information out of our ERP (Vista/TC-1). In general, Prophix is faster and more reliable than Spreadsheet server, but the specific integration between Prophix and our ERP (and Project Management Software InEight) has caused us issues
Prophix stands out based on its capabilities for centralizing of financial data, automating workflows, reducing version controls, improving speed, more auditability and better collaboration.
Prophix is so much easier to use that other platforms or products. It can be customized so much easier than other larger, more expensive products. I work for a small university where we have a small finance team and Prophix allows us to tailor reporting to emerging needs in …
Prophix was already implemented when I joined the company, but in my previous job, we used OneStream, which seemed more complicated to set up and to update behind the scenes if the business changed.
There are still times that I find myself thinking that "I would have been done with this already" in Excel. Most (possibly all) the colleagues I know in our industry haven't outgrown using Excel yet... Overall, now that I feel I (mostly) "know what I'm doing" and am thru the learning stage the system I'm seeing benefit...however also feel like I haven't 'scratched the surface' of what it's capable of. Dynamic Planning, Predict/Signals, AI ...I feel we have a huge learning curve still ahead. I've explored Signals and AI Analyst and haven't been able to get reliable results to drive me to use it more...which leads me to believe we have core implementation related issues.
Prophix is best suited if you have a very extensive budgeting process that currently relies on multiple Excel spreadsheets. It is also great if you have on-prem tools that may no longer be supported for reporting. It may not be appropriate if you require an unlimited number of mid-tier users, as it can be very expensive annually. It's definitely not a cheap tool, but the cost can at least be optimized based on users' use cases. In both organizations I've worked for that use it, cost has been mentioned.
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! 😅
Ability to filter report views for report binder without creating duplicate reports.
More extensive documentation and examples in the ProCalc library.
More ProCalc functions that deal with the time dimension and allow functions that can utilize the system date. So if it is day 8 of the month.
Ability to save company color scheme for use in reporting.
Would like to create a link between the account dimension and another dimension so I can easily report on account properties. For example, an account property could be columns in a report.
Would like to see the ability to have a report view on a dashboard. The tables are poorly formatted, and I’d like more formatting ability.
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 system works well for us, and meets all of our needs. All of our future plans can and will be achieved within Prophix, so there is no need to pursue another product. Prophix has continuously proven to improve their product over the years, which provides an even higher level of confidence in this tool, and future developments
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 don't rate anybody a 10 because I believe there's always room for improvement, so I'll go with an 8. And I'm giving 8 because it has helped us do more than we were doing before, and I believe there's still room for improvement.
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.
The availability in Prophix is relatively good. We have occurred random outages in different versions that wipe out data, which can be brought back. Or we have ran into system wide slowness that impacts all users in the system, but we have been able to get more capacity to supply our performance.
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.
Prophix has always performed consistently. We are using on-premise so many factors can contribute to slower than desired performance, most having nothing to do with Prophix itself. If we move to the web-client cloud based solution I believe performance will even be better.
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’ve gotten moved around a lot and so we don’t always know our pod people. Also when we book sessions with a random person it seems like we have to take the first 15-20 minutes explaining our system and process.
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 also offers training and certifications on their training hub. I have completed a couple of the certifications. The courses are easy to follow along with and very informative. Additionally, Planful schedules webinars pretty regularly. They'll email their customers and allow you to register to participate live. They also record these sessions so you can refer back to them at a later date or if you are unable to attend at the time the webinar is offered, you can register anyway and get access to the recording. Their training has improved year over year!
We worked with a consultant provided by the vendor for implementation. Training involved online and in person. The in person training was done throughout the implementation. It was very hands on training. As we worked through sections of the set-up, we were training on how to use various features within the product. It made learning the system very easy.
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
We used our system and created a test cube to work with our own data. We ran through the different functions of Prophix and covered alot of material. We did two sessions a week, with homework tasks assigned. We were able to ask questions and cover any questions during the followup sessions.
Most of the issues in the implementation were self inflicted, the team at Top Down was great and did a good job managing hours and teaching our team how to best handle the system. The implementation went longer than expected as they always do but the GL and erp link was up and running quickly so we could build reporting
Since company's IT department was not part of the implementation and it was done only by an executive assistant who did not have extensive knowledge about finance and accounting it was done VERY Poorly and haphazardly. Nothing was done properly and it was not planned correctly. It worked for short term but after 2 years we had to re-do all the cubes and it was very hard to fix and correct things
Personally I have only used essbase in my work. Planful has a much easier platform to use both to put together results and to load data compared to the financial reporting platforms that I have used. Planful also has better dedicated tools to create reports and build in a dedicated software that is built to report on rather than building from scratch in an excel environment
Prophix is so much easier to use that other platforms or products. It can be customized so much easier than other larger, more expensive products. I work for a small university where we have a small finance team and Prophix allows us to tailor reporting to emerging needs in real time without having to reconfigure clunky systems with expensive modifications
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.
I gave Prophix a 10 on scalability because we currently deploy the solution to department heads across our entire organization and never have any issues with those individuals using or accessing the system to look at their financial information within premade templates . They currently enter budgets and review reports within the system currently. The only issue is they cannot typically use the ad hoc functionality because that would require higher level licenses that cost more and it is not worth it to give them more costly licenses since they really aren't working in the system quite like the robust finance users
Reduced time to produce reports and compile budget leaving the team with more time to analyse the data, rather than concentrating on just compiling reports or budgets.
Improved visibility and variance reporting capability providing actionable insights to stakeholder.
The above points lead to greater buy-in into reporting and planning processes.
