Planful is NOT painful

Planful is currently used by our Technology Group, an overhead department in the company. Additionally, Kiewit Business Services, another overhead department utilizes the tool. We have other departments that have observed how easy Planful is to use and how successful we have been with meeting our budget, and they have asked for information on how to utilize it as well. We use Planful for workforce planning, budgeting, forecasting, and reporting. Kiewit's use of this program is unique in the sense that we do not use Planful for income statements and balance sheets or for any manufacturing or international currency needs. As an overhead department, we do not utilize all of its features.

I was able to set up our hierarchies to mirror what our home office accounting department requires/uses. This gave me the ability to easily export a dynamic report that I created and literally email it to accounting when they request forecast updates from our department. Also, having the ability to push financials and workforce planning out to our managers on a regular basis, pushing them to review variances, etc. without the need for excel side spreadsheets has made my job as IT Controller so much easier and has also given our users a peace of mind when using the tool.

Unfortunately, the tool doesn't make it up to our CFO office, as we are just an overhead department using it to track our operational expenses. But I will add that our department has been UNDER budget every year since using Planful, and being an overhead department, it is essential that we are under budget and not at risk of reducing revenue by creating additional overhead.

We have automated reports we use weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly. We do not use Planful it is the truest and fullest ability for financial planning holistically for income statements, balance sheets, etc. as we are an Overhead department. We also use Planful for all Workforce planning in structured planning. This has helped us tremendously and allows us to budget and forecast using actual payroll numbers.

Dynamic reports are so easy to create. When we first began using Planful it was challenging, but now that we've used the program for a few years, Planful continually improves the capabilities and it has enabled us to continue to do better and better. Dynamic reports are very easy. I think dashboards could improve some. I think it would be helpful to have the ability to set up an enterprise dashboard that all users can view, allowing them to see how we are trending budget vs actuals and how we are progressing through the year on an enterprise level, rather than just the security level they have access to see. Read-only with no drill-through capabilities would be desired.

Planful is so easy to manipulate. Even when we have new money managers request access, it takes very little training to run through their responsibilities in the program and how to utilize all of the tools they need. I've stated it before, the improvements over the years have been impeccable, continually getting better and easier to use.

This feature was the final deciding factor for us to purchase Planful. It is a priceless feature to have financials at all of our money manager's fingertips daily (and even hourly). It has helped us streamline so many processes. With the built-in access security, we are able to use real salary numbers for budgeting and forecasting, whereas in the past we didn't have security features in our custom-built tool, so we were constantly experiencing variances due to the use of blended rates.

Our data accuracy has definitely been impacted by the use of Planful. In the past, it was very difficult to reconcile our processes in our custom-built tool to the "one source of the truth" data that comes out of SAP. Moving onto the Planful platform, I have been asked multiple times if I believed in the data in Planful. Multiple times I was able to pull up EXACT numbers from our SAP systems to prove the data, and the more and more I've performed that task over the years, our Money Manager's confidence in Planful's data has grown!

This one is easy! We recently wanted to map an account to a line in our Opex Template so that when Capex items were built in the Capex template, it would fill those amounts into the depreciation line of the Opex Template, to gain awareness for our Money Managers that there were Capex items in their forecast. I reached out to Planful, thinking it could possibly take weeks to create and test in the sandbox environment, only to have it done within 30 minutes. They were so absolutely helpful, and what I loved most about that particular challenge was they didn't just do it for me, they were willing to SHOW ME how to do it so I might make enhancements to our environment on my own in the future.

I don't think I would have changed the evaluation process. Although I was not part of the group that did the evaluation, I have been the subject matter expert and essentially "owned" the tool in my organization since the day they made the decision. This was an easy decision when we compared other tools and their cost as well as the flexibility Planful provides.

I really don't have any specific recommendations for this area simply because we have internal IT folks that typically handle configurations of our systems. I do know that Planful has been very helpful throughout the years we have been using the system each and every time we look to improve upon our use of the software.

I do not have any additional configuration or customizations that I wish to include in this survey

No, we currently have a contract with a 3rd party company that is owned by a previous Planful employee that we built a relationship with before Planful offered their premium support.

When we negotiated with Planful, we discussed cost as well as renewal of licenses. We also discussed what we needed to do when we required additional licenses, or we were not using all of the licenses we had purchased. Their business model is very flexible and again, their staff is just super easy to work with.

The only tip I can think of that will help customers more effectively deal with Planful is don't be afraid to speak up. My team has created a "wish list" of features that would enhance our experience and usability with Planful, and we meet regularly with our Customer Success Manager to discuss this list. One of our wish list items just became a new feature with a recent release, and we couldn't be happier!