Item: Planful
Rating: 10
Author: Robert Picard

Overall Satisfaction with Planful

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Planful every week to update our FP&A schedule throughout the year by using various modules on the platform. For instance, when looking at actual versus planned reports in the reports section, I use the report sets that are in there to extract information with regards to our financial KPIs.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Creating forecasts for the month, quarter, and year
Creating new variables by using variables pre-defined and that are new in the system
Having a very simple setup in the reports section - not straying away from the old Excel model which most people are used to. I can speak for a lot of people when I say that tools that look new can easily be frightening! 😅

Cons

I think that the load times for creating or deleting scenarios could be faster. nI addition, if they could start out by not being locked, that would be nice too.
Sometimes, when I copy from Google Sheets and paste in Planful, I get a weird error string that doesn't tell me where I went wrong. Having something similar to MS Excel which says what might be causing the error would be super helpful as well.
I think emails saying that a scenario has been deleted (if deleted by somebody else) would be helpful in case that communication is not sent out or received.

Collaboration with Planful

It's enhanced my ability greatly as the information that comes from Planful, and the analysis, helps inform business leaders in my organization, who then take what I give them to inform other business partners within our organization. It has positively changed how we do FP&A, and I don't even want to imagine what we were doing before Planful.

Suite of Capabilities

I've benefitted by being able to take care of tasks, and other ad hoc assignments from my supervisors, by interacting and learning from the platform. If there's one thing I could say about this tool to speak to it's effectiveness, it is how easy it is to catch on to the different ways to use it! :)

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Excel

I wasn't here when we transitioned to Planful, but I would imagine the reason, based off of what I've heard in the past, is because of how dynamic and interactive it is across multiple sheets at the same time. I can't imagine trying to link a bunch of Excel sheets together - Planful saves me here.

Key Insights

Do you think Planful delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Planful's feature set?

Yes

Did Planful live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Planful go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Planful again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Tableau Desktop, Snowflake, Microsoft Excel

Likelihood to Recommend

Scenarios where it would be well-suited:
- Creating actual versus planned dashboards for budgetary and FP&A purposes
- Exporting or creating reports to examine vendor details, KPIs by a certain parameter, etc.

Scenarios where it is less appropriate:
- Creating very very intricate charts and graphs - I use Tableau for this if I want to easily interact with charts and tables
- Linking it to a database and making it more "alive" - for instance, in Tableau, I connect that to a database. I can't tell you how many times I've wished that I could do this with Planful.

Planful Feature Ratings

Comments

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Everybody has a Plan until they get Planful'd! (positive review 👍)

Modules Used