Planful - A great way to take your financial planning needs to the next level
March 01, 2022
Planful - A great way to take your financial planning needs to the next level
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Structured Planning
- Dynamic Planning
- Reporting
- Consolidation
Overall Satisfaction with Planful (formerly Host Analytics)
We use Planful to fulfill our financial reporting and consolidation needs, as well as to create budgets / forecasts. Prior to Planful, all of these tasks were being done in Excel; as the business has grown over time though, setting up a platform that would serve as our single source of truth became increasingly more important. Planful is now that source of truth for us that we can rely on.
Pros
- Reporting makes it easy to "slice and dice" data as needed, as well as build out report sets that you can use to ensure the consistent look of reports like balance sheets.
- Data load rules and translation tables provide the flexibility to load data from multiple source systems with relative ease.
- Structured planning templates, combined with rolling forecasts, can dramatically cut down the time needed to get a baseline and make tweaks as desired.
Cons
- User security control could be more centralized on the platform, where you may need to navigate to multiple screens to ensure the access granted is what it should be, depending on your system setup.
- Dynamic planning (while certainly powerful and can help fulfill special use cases) does have more of a learning curve vs. other areas of Planful, especially if you are not using it frequently. That being said, Planful does have training and resources to help acquire that knowledge.
- Out-of-the-box intercompany reporting in the consolidation module can be tricky depending on how balances are booked in local source systems. Building reports using the intercompany dimension can be challenging depending on your specific company (entity) structure, but it can be done with some testing and validation.
- Using Planful has eliminated days of work each month for our monthly consolidation and reporting vs. the manual Excel process we had. This savings is still realized even with adding new companies / source systems to the mix.
- Creating new forecast scenarios on the fly has given the Finance team the ability to quickly build a baseline and make tweaks as needed, while having those scenarios available to build reports on and compare the results.
- We now have more visibility into the underlying data, as we can identify the data in Planful by the dimensions like department, location, and so forth.
Planful has made it possible for the Finance team to plan in a defined, consistent manner with templates that are used across the business. At the same time, templates (and reports) are designed to where the key stakeholders outside of Finance (ex. Marketing) can understand how their spend is being planned out and provide input on those values thanks to how the data is broken down by dimensions.
It really cannot be overstated how having Planful as the single source of truth has simplified our processes and made it so we can meet our reporting requirements, even as those may change over time. We can now run reports that pull in our actual data and easily compare against any of our scenarios like the annual budget or the current forecast at whatever level of consolidation we need to see...on the fly. With the planning templates and rolling forecasts, we can use the previous forecast values as the baseline and just fine-tune the new forecast based on business conditions.
Besides Planful, I have experience with Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning. While SIBP could be perfectly fine for a company already on Sage Intacct and with higher level budgeting needs, I'd say Planful is a more versatile software to work with because of how the data can be broken down into dimensions that you define in your implementation, as well as the ability to quickly create new scenarios for your budgets / forecasts. With the planning templates, they can be designed however you need them to be and even assigned to specific users to fill in if desired (ex. a sales manager fills in expected orders each month in a template, which could then be used to drive the sales budget values through calculations based on how your business operates).
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?
I wasn't involved with the implementation phase
Would you buy Planful again?
Yes
Comments
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