Item: Planful
Rating: 10
Author: Gaylord Miller

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Planful is used across the enterprise. It drives accounting reporting through close, financial, and performance analysis. It is used to support and guide operations. Planful is used for budgeting, forecasting, and cash management. Planful is deployed at our practice and support center, facilitation business unit planning - production, and expense and workforce planning. Planful drives allocations of costs and people across departments and business units. Finally, Planful is used for intercompany eliminations.

Pros and Cons

Monthly reporting.
External source linkages.
Non-financial data.
Organization-wide user base.

Data visualization.
HRIS integration.
Non-user interface.

Return on Investment

Real-time financial reports and analysis.
Rapid deployment.
Enterprise-wide budgeting and forecasting.

Automation

Yes. The process is now fully automated and financial statements are produced within 15 minutes of accounting close. This has freed up the equivalent of 2 FA's time for analytics and value-added management reporting.

Ease of Reporting

Planful's interface is intuitive. With minimal training, 2 FA's learned to build reporting in less than 60 days.

Finance Self-Service

Planful is designed to be a self-serve application. Users are easily able to build and save their own reports with individual folders, as well as run and modify reports built specifically for them. In addition to our finance and accounting teams, Planful is also used by department leaders, operations team members, and external business partners.

Alternatives Considered

We used Adaptive Insights (now Workday) and considered both Anaplan and OneStream. Planful was the most appropriate for our environment based on a single individual as a power user/system administrator, our requirement to not engage long term with external partners for application development and support, and to build repeatable, scalable, and burstable reports. We are in rapid expansion via acquisitions mode with Planful's ability to easily load external financial data, either via Excel data load or API.

Key Insights

Do you think Planful delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Planful's feature set?

Yes

Did Planful live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Planful go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Planful again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Acumatica, Dell Boomi, Paycor

Likelihood to Recommend

Planful does well with entity consolidation and reporting. It is highly reliable and structured for multiple entities, currencies, and standard financial reporting. Additionally, it supports accounting functions with robust reporting and drill-through functionality. It does not require dedicated internal or external support. It is easily managed by in-house FP&A. However, it is not an ERP and may not work well in a manufacturing environment. Planful may not scale well to companies over $5B. It is not intended as a data warehouse.

Planful - Go fast, meet your needs

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Planful (formerly Host Analytics)