Item: Planful
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

[Planful (formerly Host Analytics)] is mostly being used by Finance group to report monthly financial results. Have built our Budget in the modeling scenario, but we are not finalized tweaking the results of this. Being our first full year on Planful are still learning how to do some setup and making it work for us.

Pros and Cons

Able to have entire budget and actual results in one tool.
Fast results that can be trusted. No worry of excel links being broken.
Results from current system can be directly interfaced into Planful

Need to take more time up front to fully understanding client’s processes
Wish the models would automatically sum up better rather than having to enter an aggregation step
Previous model results don’t always clear themselves. Need to make sure you include clear steps, but it’s not always clear when and where you should do this

Return on Investment

Saved an entire day on finance team’s ability to complete results
CFO receives results that he can trust because he knows they are coming from one source
Budget process and hand off between departments is much more efficient

Automation

Planful [(formerly Host Analytics)] has made an impact on our budgeting process by making it a much smoother process between all departments. Each department can now see and has visibility to other inputs and these inputs can actually be forwarded on to the next team to use. Therefore there is no risk of miscommunication, which we seemed to experience quite frequently before Planful.

Ease of Reporting

This is probably the area that we need to revisit and I wish we knew more about. We spent a lot of time just getting the modeling and basic reporting completed that we didn’t build many dashboards or KPI reports that we really wanted. We are struggling to build on our own, so make sure you include these tasks when your Planful [(formerly Host Analytics)] implementation team is still available.

Finance Self-Service

This is probably the best feature of Planful [(formerly Host Analytics)]. Users can easily get to and review financial reports.

Likelihood to Recommend

The workforce planning tool works very well and is quite easy to setup and maintain. Wish there was a way for each model to use the same set of data, for example customers, products, etc. you need to build each in each model.

Nice tool but make sure you take the time upfront to discuss setup with implementation team.

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Planful (formerly Host Analytics)