Item: Planful
Rating: 8
Author: Hunter Branch

Overall Satisfaction with Planful

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Planful in a daily capacity to provide financial analysis to our field team in order for them to operate more efficiently. It allows me to aggregate both financial data along with key performance metrics so that I can answer questions for operators to drive efficiency and answer questions about the health of the business. It also lets me create dedicated reports so that I can quickly report on our financials to our key stakeholders both on a monthly basis and when they have questions about the business. Recently I have been using the planning templates in an effort to create in depth models to attempt to forecast and budget future expense based on historicals and key data inputs.

Pros and Cons

Pros

It aggregates data from different sources well, allowing me to report on a wide variety of metrics that interrelate.
I can build detailed reports so that my monthly and weekly reporting is done more efficiently
I like the tools that I am using to create dedicated models for forecasting and budgeting purposes

Cons

I think there is an opportunity to allow for more customization of reports so that they can be finalized in Planful
Data aggregation of very large data sets can be slow at times
Dashboards need more features in order to have a better use case

Return on Investment

I am able to report faster on financials and KPIs
I am able to create reports that show the impact KPIs have on the financials due to the data aggregation abilities
The attributes and drill down capabilities allow me to answer questions related to financial performance in a detailed and efficient manner

Collaboration with Planful

I think the most important thing it has done is the efficiency it has created in aggregating data form multiple sources and allowing me to create dedicated reports to provide feedback to field teams in order for them to make decisions faster. Additionally thanks to the template creation process I can quickly iterate on future performance by changing inputs that drive our historical performance

Suite of Capabilities

Efficiency in reporting is the main way in which I have benefited from Planful. Currently we have many questions from different stakeholders about our financial performance and Planful gives me the ability to answer questions with a detailed response in a timely manner.

Alternatives Considered

Personally I have only used essbase in my work. Planful has a much easier platform to use both to put together results and to load data compared to the financial reporting platforms that I have used. Planful also has better dedicated tools to create reports and build in a dedicated software that is built to report on rather than building from scratch in an excel environment

Key Insights

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?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Planful go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Planful again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Dayforce, Microsoft Power BI

Likelihood to Recommend

I think it is a useful tool from a reporting standpoint. It does a good job of data aggregation from different sources, even if slow at times. I think the tools for building forecasting and budgeting templates are straight forward but allow for a level of complexity that make it both easy to use but also allow for complex builds so that our models can take into account many different variables that drive our daily performance.

Planful Feature Ratings

Comments

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Planful - strong for financial reporting and data aggregation

Modules Used