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Planful

Planful

Overview

What is Planful?

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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Recent Reviews

Planful is NOT painful

10 out of 10
December 13, 2023
Planful is currently used by our Technology Group, an overhead department in the company. Additionally, Kiewit Business Services, another …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 45 features
  • Financial budgeting (106)
    8.2
    82%
  • Management Reporting (100)
    8.0
    80%
  • Forecasting (99)
    8.0
    80%
  • Management reporting (103)
    8.0
    80%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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N/A
Unavailable

What is Planful?

Planful is a cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM) suite. It includes financial applications for modeling, planning, consolidation, reporting and analytics.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Alternatives Pricing

What is Kepion Planning?

Kepion is a cloud planning & analytics software company that connects all organizations' teams under a single view of their business performance. We enable more intelligent decisions to be made by companies about their financial and operational future. Kepion global offices and partners deliver…

What is PlanGuru?

PlanGuru is budgeting, forecasting and financial analytics software for SMB's, Nonprofits and the Accountants/ Advisors that work with them.

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Features

BI Standard Reporting

Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.

6.6
Avg 8.0

Ad-hoc Reporting

Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.

7.3
Avg 8.3

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

6.6
Avg 8.2

Data Discovery and Visualization

Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.

6.3
Avg 7.6

Access Control and Security

Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.

8.5
Avg 8.7

Mobile Capabilities

Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

7.4
Avg 8.0

Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting

These activities are designed to assist with both data-driven operational, short-term planning and strategic long term planning

8
Avg 8.3

Consolidation and Close

Consolidation of data from multiple entities with currency management, reporting and audit trails.

6.6
Avg 8.0

Financial Reporting and Compliance

Financial statements and regulatory filings

7.3
Avg 8.2

Analytics and Reporting

Dashboards and scorecards for KPI monitoring and benchmarking

6.1
Avg 8.0

Integration

Ability to integrate with external applications.

6.8
Avg 8.3
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Product Details

What is Planful?

Planful offers end-to-end financial close, consolidation, and financial planning & analysis (FP&A) cloud software. The Planful platform is used by the Office of the CFO around the globe to streamline business-wide planning, budgeting, consolidations, reporting, and visual analytics. The vendor states Planful's more than 1,000 customers, including Boston Red Sox, Del Monte, TGI Friday’s, and 23andMe, rely on Planful to accelerate cycle times, increase productivity, and improve accuracy across the end-to-end FP&A process. Planful is a private company backed by Vector Capital, a leading global private equity firm. Learn more at www.planful.com.

STRUCTURED PLANNING Structured Planning with Planful automates labor-intensive planning activities in a cloud-based platform – to give the finance team control, consistency, and confidence in corporate financial plans, budgets, and forecasts.

DYNAMIC PLANNING Dynamic Planning with Planful enables flexible, high-frequency, data-driven planning, modeling, and decision-making so users in every corner of the organization can analyze, plan, and make confident decisions at the speed of business.

FINANCIAL CLOSE & CONSOLIDATION Financial Close & Consolidation with Planful empowers finance to accelerate month-end close and reporting cycles by automating data aggregation, journal entries, intercompany eliminations, minority interest, entity consolidation, currency conversion, and financial reporting.

FINANCIAL REPORTING Reporting with Planful provides a library of reporting formats and delivery options, enabling finance and business users to produce a wide range of interactive financial and management reports leveraging one source of truth.

WORKFORCE PLANNING Planful helps users to tackle workforce planning using accurate and current data from across the business. By simplifying and automating time-consuming tasks and building alignment across departments, users have more time to create a stronger people strategy.

PLANFUL FOR MARKETING Planful’s marketing solution, formerly known as Plannuh, is used to measure marketing at every level of the plan for full visibility and team efficiency. To protect the marketing budget, Planful for Marketing helps marketers build, measure, execute and improve with clarity.

Planful Features

Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting Features

  • Supported: Long-term financial planning
  • Supported: Financial budgeting
  • Supported: Forecasting
  • Supported: Scenario modeling
  • Supported: Management reporting

Consolidation and Close Features

  • Supported: Financial data consolidation
  • Supported: Journal entries and reports
  • Supported: Multi-currency management
  • Supported: Intercompany Eliminations
  • Supported: Minority Ownership
  • Supported: Local and consolidated reporting
  • Supported: Detailed Audit Trails

Financial Reporting and Compliance Features

  • Supported: Financial Statement Reporting
  • Supported: Management Reporting
  • Supported: Excel-based Reporting
  • Supported: Automated board and financial reporting

Analytics and Reporting Features

  • Supported: Personalized dashboards
  • Supported: Color-coded scorecards
  • Supported: KPIs
  • Supported: Cost and profitability analysis
  • Supported: Key Performance Indicator setting

Integration Features

  • Supported: Flat file integration
  • Supported: Excel data integration
  • Supported: Direct links to 3rd-party data sources

BI Standard Reporting Features

  • Supported: Pixel Perfect reports
  • Supported: Customizable dashboards
  • Supported: Report Formatting Templates

Ad-hoc Reporting Features

  • Supported: Drill-down analysis
  • Supported: Formatting capabilities
  • Supported: Predictive modeling
  • Supported: Report sharing and collaboration

Report Output and Scheduling Features

  • Supported: Publish to Web
  • Supported: Publish to PDF
  • Supported: Report Versioning
  • Supported: Report Delivery Scheduling

Data Discovery and Visualization Features

  • Supported: Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
  • Supported: Predictive Analytics

Access Control and Security Features

  • Supported: Multi-User Support (named login)
  • Supported: Role-Based Security Model
  • Supported: Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
  • Supported: Report-Level Access Control
  • Supported: Single Sign-On (SSO)

Mobile Capabilities Features

  • Supported: Responsive Design for Web Access
  • Supported: Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile

Planful Screenshots

Screenshot of Planful Planform DashboardScreenshot of Planful for FinanceScreenshot of Planful for MarketingScreenshot of ReportsScreenshot of Capacity Planning TemplateScreenshot of Integrations

Planful Videos

Planful Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported CountriesWe have customers in 90 countries
Supported LanguagesEnglish

Frequently Asked Questions

Planful is a cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM) suite. It includes financial applications for modeling, planning, consolidation, reporting and analytics.

Workday Adaptive Planning, Anaplan, and Oracle Hyperion are common alternatives for Planful.

Reviewers rate Single Sign-On (SSO) highest, with a score of 9.2.

The most common users of Planful are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).

Planful Customer Size Distribution

Consumers0%
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)10%
Mid-Size Companies (51-500 employees)25%
Enterprises (more than 500 employees)65%
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(204)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-13 of 13)
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Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Planful for our month end financial reporting, operating planning process, and ad hoc requests. The platform has grown with us from 100 business units to over 600 business units and through an IPO. The platform is dynamic and flexible and with constant updates, it will absolutely grow with us into the future.
  • Planning templates - bottoms up planning
  • Integration with Excel
  • offline planning in excel
  • ability to add attributes after configuration
  • reliance on third parties for application audits and best practices
  • charging for sandbox refreshes
Well suited for a medium to large business, beginner friendly, completely customizable. Probably too much for a small business/low count of business units.
December 13, 2023

Planful is NOT painful

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Planful is currently used by our Technology Group, an overhead department in the company. Additionally, Kiewit Business Services, another overhead department utilizes the tool. We have other departments that have observed how easy Planful is to use and how successful we have been with meeting our budget, and they have asked for information on how to utilize it as well. We use Planful for workforce planning, budgeting, forecasting, and reporting. Kiewit's use of this program is unique in the sense that we do not use Planful for income statements and balance sheets or for any manufacturing or international currency needs. As an overhead department, we do not utilize all of its features.
  • Workforce planning is amazing. We can personalize each record, and updating is very simple.
  • The ability to have a rolling forecast is very useful for us in an overhead department. It enables us to pull up information on what we are forecasting for company IT costs for the upcoming years.
  • The flexibility of the program and the reporting has been extremely helpful for us.
  • They customer service is 2nd to NONE!
  • Their willingness to improve their tool based on feedback from business user groups, customer advisory boards and their planful engage program is absolutely amazing.
  • Dashboards need improvements. It would be nice to have a VIEW ONLY ability to push a dashboard to select users at the top level of finances for the group.
  • Dated Hierarchies are cumbersome and not as helpful as they could be. There is so much opportunity with dated hierarchies, especially during re-organizations and budgeting.
I am constantly talking about Planful and the benefits of using the system. I have been on numerous calls for Planful with possible clients, and I am always honest about how well the program works and how happy we are. Planful is flexible, and when changes are needed to our environment, Planful developers are always happy to help and walk us through all necessary scenarios.
Jennie Rush | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Planful ) at a department level here for budgeting and forecasting our department costs. It is helping us manage our workforce as well as stay on budget for the year. We have been able to complete a rolling forecast and allows our money managers to budget better than they ever have in the past. Because we are doing so well managing our finances, we’ve recognized ways that we can help other home office depts be more successful in their workforce planning and financials. In 2021, had Kiewit Technology Group not used Planful, we may not have been under budget. So, our dept being under budget resulted in All Overhead Depts coming in under budget.
  • Workforce Planning Enhancements have been huge for our dept.
  • Support has increased significantly since we started four years ago
  • They are able to be used on Cloud
  • Providing customers monthly releases of enhanced/new products
  • Always working with their customers on how they can better the tool
  • Need to make some manual processes automatic
  • Would like to allow hierarchies to be scenario specific
  • Would like a PowerBI integration
We have already recommended it to other departments and they are using it now. I work a lot in the workforce planning section and they have made huge strides to the manual way it was when I started using it. Currently we are working on automating workforce data and once that is complete, we will roll that out to other departments. Also, doing some research with another dept that is interested in Planful & how we can make sure the tool gives them everything they want.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our business uses Planful for easily repeatable (push button) month end and quarter end reporting. We also use it to create bottoms up forecasts and budgets. Planful has given us the ability to make changes in a forecast and see the results very quickly in reports and to keep versions in check.
  • GL level forecasting/budgeting
  • Push Button month end reporting
  • Hierarchy control
  • Structure planning is very clunky and does not give give enough flexibility to make mass changes
  • Reporting struggles mixing variables together in the same report. If you want a combination between time and scenario there is no great way to make a joint scenario (We have had a support ticket out for a couple weeks to solve this with no great solution in place yet).
  • Getting to certain reports requires an understanding of MDX
  • Sandbox has been removed as a portion of the product and is now an upcharge meaning there is no room to test anymore without paying the absurd amount requested. Ours was removed mid contract.
  • Support can be slow for issues that seem like they should already have solutions for
Planful is useful for quick to learn users (Dynamic planning should be a better option for most users but has a steeper learning curve) and who want to get month end reporting out of excel and into something more repeatable. It does a good job of bringing systems together to create a forecast (HRIS, database) as long as the data coming from these systems can sit in one place and can be easily tied into other dimensions from your GL. Its less versatile for (at least in structured planning) planning by vendor (or any dimension where you have a lot of individual lines). There is no sandbox environment without paying for it, so testing can be difficult on new asks. If you have very complicated revenue streams that require many pieces it can be difficult to build and maintain those within Planful (structured planning). There is no great tool to get your pieces currently in excel or other into Planful so setup time is mostly spent replicating instead of learning to features or improving your reports along the way.
Robert Picard | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Planful every week to update our FP&A schedule throughout the year by using various modules on the platform. For instance, when looking at actual versus planned reports in the reports section, I use the report sets that are in there to extract information with regards to our financial KPIs.
  • 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! 😅
  • I think that the load times for creating or deleting scenarios could be faster. nI addition, if they could start out by not being locked, that would be nice too.
  • Sometimes, when I copy from Google Sheets and paste in Planful, I get a weird error string that doesn't tell me where I went wrong. Having something similar to MS Excel which says what might be causing the error would be super helpful as well.
  • I think emails saying that a scenario has been deleted (if deleted by somebody else) would be helpful in case that communication is not sent out or received.
Scenarios where it would be well-suited:
- Creating actual versus planned dashboards for budgetary and FP&A purposes
- Exporting or creating reports to examine vendor details, KPIs by a certain parameter, etc.

Scenarios where it is less appropriate:
- Creating very very intricate charts and graphs - I use Tableau for this if I want to easily interact with charts and tables
- Linking it to a database and making it more "alive" - for instance, in Tableau, I connect that to a database. I can't tell you how many times I've wished that I could do this with Planful.

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Planful to fulfill our financial reporting and consolidation needs, as well as to create budgets / forecasts. Prior to Planful, all of these tasks were being done in Excel; as the business has grown over time though, setting up a platform that would serve as our single source of truth became increasingly more important. Planful is now that source of truth for us that we can rely on.
  • Reporting makes it easy to "slice and dice" data as needed, as well as build out report sets that you can use to ensure the consistent look of reports like balance sheets.
  • Data load rules and translation tables provide the flexibility to load data from multiple source systems with relative ease.
  • Structured planning templates, combined with rolling forecasts, can dramatically cut down the time needed to get a baseline and make tweaks as desired.
  • User security control could be more centralized on the platform, where you may need to navigate to multiple screens to ensure the access granted is what it should be, depending on your system setup.
  • Dynamic planning (while certainly powerful and can help fulfill special use cases) does have more of a learning curve vs. other areas of Planful, especially if you are not using it frequently. That being said, Planful does have training and resources to help acquire that knowledge.
  • Out-of-the-box intercompany reporting in the consolidation module can be tricky depending on how balances are booked in local source systems. Building reports using the intercompany dimension can be challenging depending on your specific company (entity) structure, but it can be done with some testing and validation.
Planful is definitely appropriate where you need to consolidate and report on multiple companies (and currencies if global). I'd also say if you need to create monthly forecasts and be able to do actual vs. budget vs. forecast analysis, Planful is the right choice to accomplish those goals, especially if you want to look at your data by company, department, location, or any other dimension that you would define in your implementation.
November 10, 2021

Planful Use

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Planful for reporting and planning purposes. Our reporting is shared throughout the entire company along with user access at each of our facilities. It has helped lead to more efficient and real time reporting. Also, we have utilized dynamic reporting to get fast and easy ad hoc reporting needs.
  • Budgeting.
  • User friendly.
  • Support.
  • Fewer clicks.
We have recently moved our 3 month rolling forecast inside planful which lead to real time forecasting after inputs. Leaders have been very happy with this implementation. One thing that could improve is designing planning templates. There are many clicks involved to get an account mapped to a specific destination.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
[Planful (formerly Host Analytics)] is mostly being used by Finance group to report monthly financial results. Have built our Budget in the modeling scenario, but we are not finalized tweaking the results of this. Being our first full year on Planful are still learning how to do some setup and making it work for us.
  • Able to have entire budget and actual results in one tool.
  • Fast results that can be trusted. No worry of excel links being broken.
  • Results from current system can be directly interfaced into Planful
  • Need to take more time up front to fully understanding client’s processes
  • Wish the models would automatically sum up better rather than having to enter an aggregation step
  • Previous model results don’t always clear themselves. Need to make sure you include clear steps, but it’s not always clear when and where you should do this
The workforce planning tool works very well and is quite easy to setup and maintain. Wish there was a way for each model to use the same set of data, for example customers, products, etc. you need to build each in each model.
Lauraleigh Gould | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The corporate accounting group uses Planful [(formerly Host Analytics)] for consolidation of +/- 15 companies across 6 currencies and several ERP systems. All financial management and external public reporting requirements come from the data in Planful and a mix of standard reporting and "Spotlight" reporting. The FP&A group uses the Structured Planning module for annual expense budgeting in conjunction with CapEx and Workforce Planning pieces. Dynamic Planning is utilized for detailed sales budgets. Dynamic Planning is also used to model sales analytics.
  • Consolidation is easily implemented as the business intelligence exists pre-built.
  • Reports are easily built and manipulated
  • The financial data blends seamlessly with budget, forecast, etc.
  • Dynamic Planning is fantastic but does have a steep learning curve. Training covers the basics, but don't expect to build detailed models at the onset.
Planful [(formerly Host Analytics)] works best in an environment where users are willing to break from spreadsheets and are open to new technology. A dedicated "super user" in house is very helpful if there are plans to roll out to different departments. Consolidation can be completely managed within the accounting group without IT support, however really getting the benefit from the forecasts, dashboards, etc requires a bit more daring.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Planful (formerly Host Analytics) is primarily [used] within the Financial Planning department for creating an annual plan, maintaining a current forecast, preliminary review of numbers with accounting and reporting of financial information for various internal and external constituents.
  • Dynamic reporting is very intuitive and plug and play
  • Structure planning makes for a quick implementation and a low level of administration going forward
  • The admin back-end for user management and structured HR can be clunky and frustrating to remember how to do a simple task
  • The process for transferring data between dynamic planning and structured planning is not very good
Planful (formerly Host Analytics) is great for quick implementations. More advanced dynamic planning has a bit of a learning curve, but it is very powerful.
November 13, 2020

Host Analytics

Niru Irukulla | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We migrated from a spreadsheet based budget process to Host Analytics. Data integrity, version control and having single source of truth were issues we encountered with spreadsheets and that is now something we do not have to worry about. I agree with some of the other users in that the interface may not be the best, especially for those of us who have used Hyperion products in the past but it does the job. You will not need IT involvement in maintaining the tool, implementation was fast and cost effective.

We now have budget, actuals and forecast data in one system rather than numerous spreadsheets. There is more time for analysis, as opposed to checking and re-checking data in excel files. The finance team can finally be partners to the business and provide data in a timely and consistent manner. Host Analytics customer support is excellent, and overall very attentive to customer feedback on features and product enhancements. In fact, they released some features in workforce planning that we had asked for.
  • Workforce Planning. The ability to plan payroll taxes, benefits and merit at the employee level. Important for SW company where headcount is major cost driver.
  • BI like tool for reporting; takes some getting used to but powerful once you get the hang of it.
  • Data load rules, allows ease of uploading data such as headcount or GL data. Set up the rule once and just reuse it.
  • Dynamic planning; offers excel like interface and more flexibility than structured planning
  • Takes a lot of clicks to complete tasks
  • If you use structured planning as well as dynamic planning it does feel like i am managing 2 systems. would be nice if it was one integrated platform
  • Templates with calculations, reference accounts and history data can be slow to open
  • Workforce reporting cube is not intuitive
  • Lots of focus on bells and whistles type of features such as AI, machine learning. worry that they may lose focus on core functionality.
  • Dynamic planning is very flexible, with that comes the woes of having an open canvas to design models. Can be tricky to trouble shoot issues.
  • Would love to have usage report concept in all parts of the application including dynamic planning
It's a good option for any company looking to get off Excel budgeting. Companies of any size or industry can benefit from Host Analytics.
Mary McLaughlin | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Host Analytics is being used by myself for budgeting, financial reporting and product gross margin reporting. The resulting reports are used by other executives within the organization.
  • I have a large amount of product data that Host has helped me organize into something I can use in my business.
  • I can get several financial reports with the push of a button each month.
  • As I use the software I realize there are more things I can do.
  • The Host customers for life team is always there to help me when I explore these possibilities.
  • It can be difficult to set up a report templates. Once set it is good and there are no worries. It would be nice it the report setup was easier to use.
  • It has a large learning curve, but I am unsure how this can be improved upon. To understand the details of how it works is a time consuming endeavor.
Financial reporting is a wonderful use. It can take the raw data and enable you to present it in almost any format you can imagine. Budgeting in Host is also a wonderful use of the software. I find that it is so much easier to look back at a budget and see "where the numbers" came from. The other major thing we use Host for is our product information - this was a monster of an Excel workbook each year and we were unable to combine time periods the way we can in Host.
August 25, 2016

Host EPM Review

Mike Johnson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Our firm currently uses Host Analytics for our financial planning and reporting. The accounting department is the primary user of the application. Other departments [have] limited exposure to the application during our budgeting and forecasting processes.
  • Reporting is a huge strength in Host. It's extremely easy to build aesthetically pleasing reports for your company. In addition, dynamic reports make it easy to build ad hoc reports quickly.
  • The planning module helps simplify budgeting and forecasting. It's highly beneficial having it all in Host and moving away from the problems we were experiencing with maintaining our budget in several giant Excel spreadsheets linked together.
  • The learning curve isn't steep with Host. Any users that are familiar with Excel will feel comfortable with building templates in no time.
  • The HR planning module is frustrating to use. I found that making a ton of changes to the payroll budget is extremely time-consuming. For any new users, I'd recommend simplifying your payroll budget to minimize use of this module.
  • The formatting capabilities are a bit limited in the reporting module. It would be nice to have formatting near the same level of Excel.
I'd recommend Host Analytics to companies looking to improve their planning process. A lot of the problems that are associated with preparing budgets in Excel (e.g. version control, user access, crashes, etc.) are mitigated in Host.
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