Planful, a good tool if you have the time and skillset to properly implement
Updated June 28, 2024

Planful, a good tool if you have the time and skillset to properly implement

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

Modules Used

  • Structured Planning
  • Reporting

Overall Satisfaction with Planful

Our business uses Planful for easily repeatable (push button) month end and quarter end reporting. We also use it to create bottoms up forecasts and budgets. Planful has given us the ability to make changes in a forecast and see the results very quickly in reports and to keep versions in check.

Pros

  • GL level forecasting/budgeting
  • Push Button month end reporting
  • Hierarchy control

Cons

  • Structure planning is very clunky and does not give give enough flexibility to make mass changes
  • Reporting struggles mixing variables together in the same report. If you want a combination between time and scenario there is no great way to make a joint scenario (We have had a support ticket out for a couple weeks to solve this with no great solution in place yet).
  • Getting to certain reports requires an understanding of MDX
  • Sandbox has been removed as a portion of the product and is now an upcharge meaning there is no room to test anymore without paying the absurd amount requested. Ours was removed mid contract.
  • Support can be slow for issues that seem like they should already have solutions for
  • Planful has saved 5-10 every month on month end reporting
  • We have saved time around keeping hierarchies and parameters up to date
  • It has allowed us to build in some additional monthly reports that were inconsistent before saving time around year end budgeting.
Planful has made it easier to gather information in one place and keep it up to date, especially the HRIS system data. Depending on which system you integrate with this can be a difficult process to get things up and running. The extra data gives us the option to say more yes to more complicated forecasting and reporting asks however it does come with the extra bit of knowing how to maintain the system and setting guidelines of what can and can't be done. Collaboration can be a bit tricky as multiple users cant be in the same structured planning templates at the same time but the commenting system is great once you have established rules on how you want to use them.
We decided not to bring our accounting suite into Planful as the processes were mostly already being done in Netsuite and we wanted to keep our ERP system as our single source of truth of GL data and not muddy it. This is probably best practice most companies that already have established ERP systems and processes. The reporting our the ERP system data though was a great improvement over what can be done in excel or ERP, and the extra data brought in (especially with drill through as an option) have helped keep some questions down and let users self service.
Planful seems to have the best price to performance option against the tools listed. Some of the more premium options on the market have outdated UIs and dont get updated as frequently and other in the same price category dont seem to have the same level of options and "ease" of use with an easy to understand UI. We also selected Planful because it was not excel based and gave us other options unlike Vena.

Do you think Planful delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Planful's feature set?

Yes

Did Planful live up to sales and marketing promises?

No

Did implementation of Planful go as expected?

No

Would you buy Planful again?

Yes

Planful is useful for quick to learn users (Dynamic planning should be a better option for most users but has a steeper learning curve) and who want to get month end reporting out of excel and into something more repeatable. It does a good job of bringing systems together to create a forecast (HRIS, database) as long as the data coming from these systems can sit in one place and can be easily tied into other dimensions from your GL. Its less versatile for (at least in structured planning) planning by vendor (or any dimension where you have a lot of individual lines). There is no sandbox environment without paying for it, so testing can be difficult on new asks. If you have very complicated revenue streams that require many pieces it can be difficult to build and maintain those within Planful (structured planning). There is no great tool to get your pieces currently in excel or other into Planful so setup time is mostly spent replicating instead of learning to features or improving your reports along the way.

Planful Feature Ratings

7.8
Long-term financial planning
8
Financial budgeting
8
Forecasting
8
Scenario modeling
6
Management reporting
9
6.0
Detailed Audit Trails
6
9.0
Financial Statement Reporting
9
Management Reporting
9
Excel-based Reporting
Not Rated
Automated board and financial reporting
9
7.0
Personalized dashboards
7
Color-coded scorecards
Not Rated
KPIs
Not Rated
Cost and profitability analysis
Not Rated
Key Performance Indicator setting
Not Rated
7.3
Flat file integration
8
Excel data integration
7
Direct links to 3rd-party data sources
7
Not Rated
Pixel Perfect reports
Not Rated
Customizable dashboards
Not Rated
Report Formatting Templates
Not Rated
7.0
Drill-down analysis
7
Formatting capabilities
6
Report sharing and collaboration
8
8.7
Publish to Web
Not Rated
Publish to PDF
8
Report Versioning
9
Report Delivery Scheduling
9
Not Rated
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
Not Rated
Predictive Analytics
Not Rated
6.8
Multi-User Support (named login)
7
Role-Based Security Model
8
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
8
Report-Level Access Control
4
Single Sign-On (SSO)
Not Rated
Not Rated
Responsive Design for Web Access
Not Rated
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
Not Rated

Planful Features and Attributes

Support is good, currently you submit a ticket and usually get a response within a couple of days to set up a call to go through the issue. The resolutions tend to be thorough it can just take a minute to get there. However, they are currently transitioning to a model that may involve the outside consultants used to implement so this may get better or worse depending on the quality of your consultant.
The UI is one of the better ones on the market and by changing certain levels of access you can simplify it further for end users. From and admin perspective most things are where you would expect however, there are some features that just don't work as expected like dynamic planning in web app and the ease to maintain/update templates in structured planning.
Planful has given us a single source of truth that automatically gets data from our sources and gives us a relatively simply way to manage the data. Our monthly reporting now is a push button process and we can spend more time actually reviewing the data.
Planful has increased our accuracy by reducing the need for manual processes, planful automatically gets our GL data daily and once we set up our reports there is minimal changes needed everyone month. Adding GL lines is as easy as adding them into the hierarchy in planful and the reports auto update (assuming they are set up correctly)
N/A

Using Planful

15 - Finance, Accounting, Marketing
3 - Everyone doing admin is in the finance org with varying levels of prior skills with similar tools to planful. If you understand database management/ERP managemant maintaining planful is very similar. The most important part of the tool is understanding the data that comes in and how you need to interact with it. Scenario management (Forecast, budget, actual) is great, you can easily separate out the data but still cross reference them when needed.
  • Single source of truth
  • Repeatable monthly reporting
  • Forecasting/Budgeting
  • Ad Hoc Reporting
  • Supplemental reporting
  • Data Clean Up
  • More Detailed Forecasting
  • Headcount Reporting
  • Additional Sales Reporting
  • CRM Integration
The tool does just about everything we need and they do a good job of adding features for a reasonable price. We have no real reason to transition to other tools.

Evaluating Planful and Competitors

  • Cloud Solutions
  • Scalability
  • Integration with Other Systems
Planfuls UI was one of the best of the tools we shopped and their price for features was one of the better on the market.
I would evaluate the add ons better, we have one in our contract that is not useful. I would also start the process even earlier as the implementations always go long.

Planful Implementation

Most of the issues in the implementation were self inflicted, the team at Top Down was great and did a good job managing hours and teaching our team how to best handle the system. The implementation went longer than expected as they always do but the GL and erp link was up and running quickly so we could build reporting.
  • Third-party professional services
Yes - We did the initial GL link to our ERP first to allow us to build out our month end reports then build out the forecasting templates. We later added some more detailed templates to our scope and then dynamic planning.
  • Not fully understanding planful capabilities and limitations
  • Issues with internal finance org changing towards the end of the process
  • Including other teams too late in the process and trying to work in those requests

Planful Support

ProsCons
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
Support cares about my success
Need to explain problems multiple times
No, there was not a need for our organization as I was confident to self service.

Using Planful

ProsCons
Like to use
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Convenient
Feel confident using
Lots to learn
  • UI
  • Hierarchy (Gl accounts etc)
  • Creating Reports
  • Integration between structured and dynamic planning
  • Managing Forecasting Templates in structured planning
  • User access can be hard to determine exactly what access someone has
Yes, but I don't use it

Integrating Planful

Integrating to Planful has more to do with the tool and how well you know the data and how you are going to link it into planful. The standard tools should be relatively easy for most to install.
  • Netsuite
  • UKG
The netsuite integration was very fast and was up an running in a matter of weeks. UKG was a much harder integration, the issues almost all stemmed from the UKG side requiring multiple internal tickets and phone calls.
  • Snowflake
  • Hubspot
Both tools are available to integrate and snowflake is supposed to be an easier integration.
  • File import/export
  • ETL tools
Plan out all your data links before you start the integration process, make sure you have the name of any backend tables and understand what the data looks like and any nuances with it.

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