Planful Review 2022

I use Planful on a monthly basis for forecast and P&L reporting. People are the huge assets of our company and we require lots of details to forecast each employee at a detail level such as billable hours and other hours. Planful can provide that level of details required. However, it's a little time consuming or duplicate efforts to manage two scenarios both actual and forecast. We used to have another system for forecast reporting that everything can be managed in one main page for employee details but it has issued of balancing. Now we have to open each employee to update the details. Of course Planful provides us better balancing tools on the reporting.

As a financial business analyst, I collect the data from the business teams and do the upload into Planful or manually enter the Opex details besides the employee details. We haven't used Planful to collect data or share with the business teams so that they can be self efficient to do their own forecast such as entering or uploading their employees billable hours forecast yet. If that happens, it will save the analysts time and do more analysis.

Planful is easy to use. Also, it has the control functionalities allow us to do something but not to do something if we override a formula cell that we shouldn't be. Hence, it improves the accuracy of the reporting. If the data are verified and accurate at the department level, the consolidation process normally runs very smoothly at the corporate level.