Planful Customer Experience
December 14, 2021
Planful Customer Experience
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Structured Planning
- Dynamic Planning
- Reporting
- Dashboards
Overall Satisfaction with Planful (formerly Host Analytics)
We use Planful for all of our reporting, including Actuals, Forecast & Budget. We have integrated it with our ERP systems and other data via stat accounts so it results in being the single source of truth. It prevents the need for tapping into data in multiple sources and data integrity within Microsoft Excel and allows for very quick querying and checking of data.
- Direct integration to ERP systems with no manual intervention.
- Very quick processing of information & transition to Excel add-in.
- Friendly staff and a customer support team that has a desire to help adopt the product more efficiently.
- The Dashboards module is still a little clunky and restricted.
- Spotlight in Powerpoint and Word need to have more seamless data intervention (e.g., variance calculation capabilities) rather than direct queries. It could be very powerful if they developed the presentation aspect of their product.
- While constant development efforts ensue, training could improve to ensure power users are equipped with the skills to use the new products/developments efficiently.
- Many days saved on month-end close.
- Significant improvement of data integrity.
- Increased collaboration and contribution from other teams.
We have expanded the users over the past couple of years by 7x by rolling out user access to several different departments and requiring them to directly contribute to the budgeting and forecasting process. By having other departments directly contribute, they have become used to accessing reports from a central repository, thereby reducing the more minuscule asks to the Finance team. Additionally, we have been able to generate more buy-in from having them have their hand in driving the projections.
Yes, the best part of having Planful is the ability to drive all reporting from a centralized location and having one version of the truth. Not only does it ensure data integrity, but it also saves a lot of time considering users are able to refresh reports on a cadence by a single click of the button when leveraging automation tools such as Substitution Variables (updates to current month on the back-end without intervention on the front-end).
I haven't used any other EPM platform that offers similar capabilities of Planful, and the decision to proceed with the purchase of Planful occurred before I started with the company. We do use SAP BusinessObjects which is able to provide us access to much more granular detail than what Planful currently provides us, but we also load some of this granular data housed in SAP BusinessObjects to Planful via data loads. SAP BusinessObjects is also much slower to query data.
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