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
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Required
Optional
Additional Details
Pricing is highly dependent on the complexity and scope of the implementation.
Host user interface was more "user friendly" so we felt it would be easier to train our users and they would actually use the system, especially as compared to SAP business Objects.
Host Analytics was more robust than Adaptive Planning. Since it is built around Excel, our users did not have to learn a new "language" as they would have with Prophix and it is more nimble and easier to support than SAP.
I used Prophix at a previous company, although more as a user than an administrator. Budget expense templates in Host Analytics can mirror what we used in Prophix. Better than that, though, we use "drivers" to move expenses based on revenue, headcount, etc., which I don't know …
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 seems to have the best price to performance option against the tools listed. Some of the more premium options on the market have outdated UIs and dont get updated as frequently and other in the same price category dont seem to have the same level of options and "ease" …
Before Prophix we used on premise Budget Maestro, we did not have good results from their software, it was buggy and its processes were antiquated. We chose Prophix for its consolidated reporting capabilities and to get all of our companies that are on 3 different ERP systems …
We chose Prophix based on the desire to make a paradigm shift away from Excel and towards a more fully-featured web-based SaaS solution that would still allow for the utilization of Excel where it made sense. Prophix does this through an Excel add-on, while more comprehensive …
Budget Maestro was too basic, Anaplan was too complex and Host Analytics didn't understand our industry or our ERP. Prophix is a partner with Viewpoint which meant there was much more knowledge on how our structure worked.
Compared to Host Analytics and Adaptive, Prophix provides more value for the dollar, especially when we deploy multiple models. Solution set is also comparably built out, so we are not missing any critical functionality. Self-maintenance by finance is also comparable to Host …
For our specific use and purpose, most of the packages we reviewed would meet practically all of our needs. Therefore, it came down to the ease/timing of implementation, the availability of support personnel, and the ability to customize for our specific needs. Prophix met …
The main reasons of why we selected Prophix are cost, value, ease of use, speed of implementation to take this into production, and demonstration of the product to us. We covered all the competitors out there in terms of reviewing on-site or conference call - Host Analytics, …
Features
Planful
Prophix
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Planful
6.1
61 Ratings
22% below category average
Prophix
8.5
64 Ratings
11% above category average
Pixel Perfect reports
6.930 Ratings
8.827 Ratings
Customizable dashboards
5.053 Ratings
8.457 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates
6.452 Ratings
8.461 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Planful
7.6
98 Ratings
2% below category average
Prophix
8.5
180 Ratings
9% above category average
Drill-down analysis
8.596 Ratings
8.9177 Ratings
Formatting capabilities
7.297 Ratings
7.7171 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration
7.291 Ratings
8.9163 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Planful
7.5
80 Ratings
7% below category average
Prophix
8.7
159 Ratings
8% above category average
Publish to Web
8.431 Ratings
00 Ratings
Publish to PDF
6.672 Ratings
8.9150 Ratings
Report Versioning
6.551 Ratings
8.6119 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling
8.560 Ratings
8.7136 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
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.
The software does its job well, and they are continuing to improve their product and listening to their customer base on where to go next. Prophix is great, and it processes large volumes of data to provide the information our financial team needs and must provide to executives.
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! 😅
Reporting - single report that can be opened by multiple users, each will see only aspect specific to them based on their security access.
Budgeting - workflow driven budget data collection, visibility of its current status, ability to take action to ensure timely completion. Ability to snapshot budget data at a point in time. Ability to perform what-if scenarios.
Forecasting - as above with added benefit of either reusing budget level of grain or forecasting at high level.
Granular planning - ability to create unlimited number of subsidiary models to assist with the planning process. Non-financial data collected during budget/forecast process help with operation planning and variance analysis.
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 have used other reporting software over the years and so far this has been the simplest to set up, the most flexible to use and we have not yet used Prophix to its full capacity. Over the next year or so I can see us extending our use of Prophix to include any number of other functions.
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.
Training is essential for this software to be successful for any company. We unfortunately had a bad implementation and training manager so I can say with confidence that if we had the CSM we have now - we would be light years ahead of our knowledge of the system. I highly suggest taking all training opportunities and not rushing the implementation training
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.
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.
Prophix Consulting should bring, in house, chargeable expertise in Oracle EBS table access for Drill Across and provide reasonable limits on dimension member combinations so there are no unreasonable expectations about the application of multi dimensional cubes to detail, such as revenue by product and customer.
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.
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
Prophix has made it possible to move away from some Excel reporting we were doing, which allows for 50% quicker reporting on a monthly basis.
Although it has saved us time, an improved PowerPoint feature that automatically updates our decks would save an additional 75% on top of what we already do.
Our Board Reporting has improved by 10 hours by moving our reports fully into Prophix.
