Planful Reviews and Ratings

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Planful for month end reporting automation and for all forecasting and budgeting needs. It also automates our month over month reporting for the accounting teams as well as any ad hoc reporting the finance team may need to provide to the rest of our org. Planful serves as a single source of truth for finance and drastically simplifies all of our processes.

Likelihood to Recommend

Planful is great for orgs with folks willing to transition out of excel and push their processes forward. If there is are detractors to a new tool Planful and any other EPM tool will be less successful than they could be. The system is great for teams who have "normal" set ups meaning data lives in a single ERP and gets supplemented from HRIS and some operation data. The more complicated the data sets become the more complicated the set up of an EPM tool becomes.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Planful to streamline Budget, Forecast and planning in our company for all of the departments. It helps us to migrate from Manual spread sheet to Platform where we can track real time data of the financials. Our use case includes FP&A, Workforce planning across the globe, management reporting and overall financial scope of the activity.

Likelihood to Recommend

Planful is well suited where company needs structured budgeting, forecasting and automated financial close. It helps the company fastening the process in automating and reduces the time of resource. Planful is not appropriate for the small company where there is small team and simple budgeting process followed in the company.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use most of the Planful modules i would say.

From reporting to consolidations and planning, we pretty much are involved in the entire stack.

Planful does a very good job with the planning and reporting. Their planning breaks down by any dimension you want it to, and then it also assigns the permissions accordingly. This allows for a natural budget/forecast rollup.

From the reporting end also, we were able to spin up hundreds of reports in no time. The reporting is modular and so you actually need less reports.

Moving away from excel is a big plus for the company since it gives the users a homogenous experience regardless of the OS they are using

Likelihood to Recommend

For companies that are small to mid-sized I think Planful can handle the planning and reporting easily.

However, for large sized companies that may have hundreds of SBUs, I would suggest having a detailed planning phase, if Planful is chosen. With many variables, there is a lot that can go wrong, and it will be a headache to fix. When it comes to edge testing for large companies, I think Planful could do a better job.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Planful Analytics serves as a critical tool for our budgeting and forecasting processes. It plays a pivotal role in our annual budgeting cycle and enables effective modeling of our five-year financial plan.

Planful has significantly enhanced the efficiency of our FP&A reporting by optimizing reporting and forecasting processes through its dynamic modeling capabilities.

Likelihood to Recommend

If asked about Planful by a colleague, I would respond by highlighting how Planful has helped our company streamline and automate our budget and FP&A reporting. Also, I would note how implementing Planful and building out our financial forecast has increased our forecast accuracy and ability to run several scenario analysis.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Planful in a daily capacity to provide financial analysis to our field team in order for them to operate more efficiently. It allows me to aggregate both financial data along with key performance metrics so that I can answer questions for operators to drive efficiency and answer questions about the health of the business. It also lets me create dedicated reports so that I can quickly report on our financials to our key stakeholders both on a monthly basis and when they have questions about the business. Recently I have been using the planning templates in an effort to create in depth models to attempt to forecast and budget future expense based on historicals and key data inputs.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Planful for budgeting and forecasting, financial reporting and workforce planning. Since we follow statutory planning and not GAAP, the ease to create and modify financials statements is critical to our organization. Before Planful our budgeting and forecasting was done in Excel which was cumbersome as well as time consuming. We find the product fits our business needs.

Likelihood to Recommend

Increased speed and accuracy of financial statement generation, ad-hoc analysis, and reporting, especially with the Spotlight add-on annotation capability in templates. Workforce planning provides us with Realtime data on our employees without needing access to the payroll system. Working with an implementation team was helpful in getting the software up and running.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Budgeting, forecasting, workforce planning and financial reporting

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited in small to medium sized companies needing a financial reporting and budgeting and forecast tools

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We do a lot of forecasting and budgeting on Planful using structured planning. We have departments across all functions, and we do our budget/ forecast for the next 3 years. We also do a lot of reporting functions, like the spotlight report. I love it because it makes the reporting very automated and easy to read.

Likelihood to Recommend

I’m not impressed that I can’t see headcounts reporting in Planful. I want to see my actual employees and all the TBHs at a later time. But the other reporting that we use is pretty good. I like using the substitution variables; they will pick up the current month, and I don’t have to keep changing the actual month.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Planful to plan our budgets and rolling forecast and to lead our monthly variance reporting. By integrating our GL data and managing planning scenarios we greatly reduced manual work in spreadsheets. We use workforce planning for headcount planning and reporting and bring in actual employees level payroll data to aid in variance analysis. We have created statical cash flow account they allows us to plan and report on detailed cash flow planning.

Likelihood to Recommend

Planful make it very easy to manage different scenarios and comparison between. However, it isn’t as easy to do quick what if modeling.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Using Dynamic Planning and Dynamic Reporting for Sales and Revenue forecasting, Monthly reporting, and having a single source of truth. We have ERP data flowing into Planful and Planful data flowing into Power BI for daily reporting and dashboarding. Addresses problems of data and mapping consistency, self-serve sales forecasts with reduced processing time and higher accuracy, and the ability to compare across scenarios and have a data source of truth feeding into a BI tool.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is very well suited for dynamic planning, forecasting, and budgeting. However, it is less suited for Efficient reporting and dashboarding—we’re still using PowerBI.