Planful

Planful Overview Review

Kommentare: Great experience, very friendly staff, and everyone wants you to succeed. The software does not require extensive coding knowledge and can be picked up pretty seamlessly with the proper training if you have a background in Excel.

Vorteile:

Very user friendly & similar syntax to excel

Nachteile:

I feel the training is basic and outdated at this point. Considering all the time and effort they have put into developing the product, they should spend more time having live sessions showing individuals how to use the product better. This would also enable customers to find out about some of the great features they created.

Planful Review

Kommentare: It has been good. Our [sensitive content hidden] of FP&A likes the tools. The FP&A [sensitive content hidden] prefers Adaptive Insights.

Vorteile:

The ability to use third-party software to integrate other systems. The Reporting in the browser is clean.

Nachteile:

Saving HC to finance and HR cubes requires many additional steps. I used Adaptive Insights, and saving to the database was much more efficient. Also, the model for our vendor spend is in Spotlight. That has led to incorrectly saving data to other scenarios.

Unfortunately Planful never worked let alone met the expectations from the sales pitch

Vorteile:

- That the licence was only three years long

Nachteile:

- The planning feature was almost impossible to use - Any new features were always only available at a price never as part of what we already were paying for - The integrators were oversold and never worked despite being paid for - The consolidation functionality roll over made January month end more painful than our annual audit process, and take almost as long

Great FP&A Product

Kommentare: We've reduced the use of excel spreadsheets for budgeting/forecasting by using this tool. It's simplified our budget and forecasting process and it keeps getting easier each year.

Vorteile:

They listen to their customers and are always making improvements to the product. It's easy to use and they have so many resources (support chat, community, training, etc).

Nachteile:

The support was not great when we first implemented the tool. They've come a long way and are truly supportive of all questions I have.

We had a quick implementation, and find that the environment is very flexible. All end users :-)

Kommentare: Monthly operational reporting time reduced from 3 days to 3 hours. We built alternative hierarchies for our chart of accounts and entities, so that operations can see their relevant data in the format they prefer, whereas accounting can see it based on GAAP. Modeling transformed our budget process from Excel spreadsheets to a cloud-based solution accessible to all end users, so budget creation migrated from FP&A to the process owners. Budget consolidation process was reduced from 2 days to 2 minutes. We have also transformed to a rolling forecast using modeling, so that the annual budgets required by lenders comes from the forecasts, and is no longer a time-consuming annual task. We have also since identified other uses for modeling, including complex calculations for our formula pricing that is based on external data imported into tables. We are also importing non-financial data to enhance our asset management deferred maintenance program.

Vorteile:

There are no limits to the types and volume of data that you interface within Host Analytics, as long as you maintain a common field. Implementation went well (with a consulting partner), and it enabled our budget manager to trim his reporting time from 3 days to 3 hours. The modeling module uses an Excel add-in, so the feel and use of Excel is still available, but the results are stored centralized, so when any end user retrieves data, there is one version of the truth. Customer service is second to none. In my 30+ years in planning and analysis, I have never found a team so dedicated to ensuring their customer's success. Feature updates are either monthly or quarterly, and are focused on what the customers have expressed are their needs or wishes.

Nachteile:

It required that we use a partner consultant to implement. This may be due mostly to the fact that as a small company, we do not have the internal IT resources; the initial implementation without a partner stalled due to resource and communication issues.