Planful's no slouch

HomeServices uses Planful primarily as a consolidation and reporting tool. We have several different ledgers across our organization and Planful makes consolidation a breeze as the translation tables are easy to setup. In addition, we are also are able to use assign attributes within the hierarchy to view results in a non-traditional format, which involves allocating results between business segments. We also use Planful as a forecasting tool, the Structured Planning module has made this process very simple as the templates are very easy to setup and complete. The templates can be a little time-consuming to navigate as they are web-based, that's my only complaint. We also use the Structured Planning module to assist with our 10-year plan, which the templates are very easy to complete. Before Planful, we were using Oracle Hyperion, which was at the end of life, the Oracle replacement was not cost-effective for us so we chose Planful from a handful of vendors that were brought in, OneStream, Blackline and Oracle Financial Close and Consolidation.

Most of our companies were using their local GL's for their internal financial reporting. Once we showed them how to use report collections, where one report can be run for many different variables, such as department, business segment, etc, our subsidiaries started using Planful for their internal reporting. We also have each of our subsidiaries update their forecast on a monthly basis, we can easily compare this to our own internal forecast so we can collaborate together to see how things will shape up for the future months.

Previously to using Planful, we were not doing a subsidiary level forecast on a monthly basis. Planful has allowed us to add this level of detail to our forecast process so we can get a much more accurate view of how we are performing on a company-by-company basis. Having the unified suite of tools all in one platform has been a huge win for us.

We only load data on a monthly basis to Planful, so real-time financial data isn't an option that we've looked to use this product for at this time.

One of our biggest pain points in our prior software was eliminations, we were able to build dynamic journals which automated the process and always assured that the entries balanced. Setting up the journals is fairly straight-forward and the dynamic journals are breeze to use and maintain.

This was a few years ago, but our cyber team wanted us to get single sign-on(SSO) setup for Planful and they wanted it done in a rush. We submitted a ticket as normal, but in addition since there was a demand to get this done ASAP, we also reached out to our client manager. Our client manager was able to get the ticket the appropriate support so that we could get SSO implemented in a very short time period.

We have two instances of Planful and we would have preferred to keep it as one, if we could go back we would have pushed for one instance.

We purchased the premium support, mainly as our timelines for month-end reporting are very short, so we wanted to be certain that if we have issues, they can be addressed immediately. Looking back, we've hardly ever had any issues, but it is comforting knowing that if we need it, we have it.