Bio-chemistry small company with complex business model
July 12, 2016

Bio-chemistry small company with complex business model

Connie Yan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Planning
  • Consolidation
  • Reporting and Analytics

Overall Satisfaction with Planful (formerly Host Analytics)

We have recently completed the project of Host implementation. It helps us a great deal in reporting, consolidations, budget, and forecast.
We have limited users in Host, but next year we will expand the usage of Host cross the company.
It is nice to have beautiful reports and able to slice and dice these reports in various ways. It gives us different views of the business at any given time which is something we could not achieve previously.
  • Host HR templates are solid built. It can mirror actual payroll process very well.
  • A number of ways data can be loaded and cleared from Host. It is flexible and easy to use.
  • Host Reports are well built. It really slice and dice our data in many ways that we could not do previously.
  • A needs a solidly build-in Balance Sheet template that Host implementation consultant can manipulate to fit for any client.
  • Modeling is still not flexible enough. We will wait couple of more years for before adopting it.
  • Forecasting can certainly use some improvements.
  • Reporting portion was a big success.
  • Budgeting and forecasting are still ironing out wrinkles, but we think we will get there in another month or two.
  • Great investment.
Being a small company with limited cash flow, my goal was to evaluate what functions that are important and how much that we have to pay for them and last how easy it is to maintain without owning internal IT staff. I have evaluated Hyperion, Adaptive, Vena, and Host. Reasonably easy to learn, reasonably easy to maintain, cost/function all came out positive with Host.
Host has the capacity and suites for many business models. My concern was the complexity of our business. We ended up building many more templates than we thought in order to make it really work for us. I guess the key is about understanding the best practice and having the support from Host to do what we need to do. Very important to us to learn experiences from similar business with similar business model who are using Host as well.

Planful Feature Ratings

Long-term financial planning
7
Financial budgeting
8
Forecasting
6
Scenario modeling
6
Management reporting
9
Financial data consolidation
8
Journal entries and reports
8
Multi-currency management
8
Intercompany Eliminations
8
Minority Ownership
8
Local and consolidated reporting
8
Detailed Audit Trails
8
Financial Statement Reporting
8
Management Reporting
8
Excel-based Reporting
8
Automated board and financial reporting
8