The Good, the Bad and the not so Ugly
Updated March 16, 2016
The Good, the Bad and the not so Ugly
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Planful (formerly Host Analytics)
Our Finance team uses this for budgeting, forecasting and reporting. This has greatly reduced the time required to manage forecasts and reporting. We are able to spend more time in analysis of data rather than generating the reports. The reports we are using are distributed to many groups including our executive team. We are able to pull data in a timely and efficient manner with high confidence in the results.
- Strong reporting tool. Able to run ad-hoc reports as needed as well as build standard reports we can use on a recurring basis.
- Good budgeting/forecasting (with the exception of limited time span). Budgeting has good features such as allowing note fields and good headcount template with various cost calculations (ie taxes, benefit, etc).
- Customer feedback is incorporated into product development and improvements
- Customers for Life group strives to address customer issues to satisfaction
- Some product features aren't fully tested before release. For example, report collections idea is great, but if a parameter is setup incorrectly, rather than returning an error message, the reports are distributed to the wrong people (causes the distribution list to scramble). Also when removing a department from the report list, this also causes the distribution list to scramble. Another example is under Template Setup. There was a bug with the filter feature that deleted mapped departments when that was not the intention.
- Their special projects process could use improvement. We had a need to edit our nightly load data and the quote process seemed somewhat random. We were quoted for work that did not need to be done as well for time that we as a customer would have been responsible for. Additionally, there was little oversight to ensure the project ran on time and smoothly. Our 1-month project took 5 months to complete. Additionally, we've had challenges with our nightly data loads while testing for this project where things that worked before no longer work, loads that pointed to a test database were forgotten to be repointed back to production, edits to the load script caused errors, etc...
- Some areas are not the most intuitive to understand. For example, understanding that data loads do not always overwrite the previous data loads but that zeroes need to be loaded.
- Rolling forecasts were promised as a product feature that would be available soon, but we have yet to see it or anything with this feature.
- Increased employee efficiency enabling us to spend more time analyzing the data than creating reports. Some up-front investments in report creation results in huge time savings on the back end.
- Improved forecasting due to the ability to update forecasts at any time over multiple periods enables us to have the most up to date information. Plus we can plan further out which saves time during budgeting season.
- Better customer service as we can address questions relatively quickly either through reporting or accessing the budget templates.
Using Planful (formerly Host Analytics)
3 - Analytical, detail oriented, creative, patient, good communication skills