Planful vs. Recko, from Stripe

I've already recommended Planful to several friends and their finance departments for reporting, budgeting, forecasting & report distribution. It's straightforward to pick up & learn if you have a solid implementation partner. If you're frustrated with manual processes, large excel files crashing, or outdated reporting/budgeting tools I highly recommend checking out Planful. At the very least, schedule a demo and have an open mind because the opportunities & time savings are invaluable.

Incentivized

• Creating forecasts for the month, quarter, and year
• Creating new variables by using variables pre-defined and that are new in the system
• Having a very simple setup in the reports section - not straying away from the old Excel model which most people are used to. I can speak for a lot of people when I say that tools that look new can easily be frightening! 😅

Incentivized

• Multiple currency calculations/ consolidations support IFRS accounting
• Ability to inactivate old data dimensions
• Reporting - Need ability to expand all/collapse all lines easily
• Reporting - Formula exceptions added to a report do not update when information is revised.
• Automatic Sandbox refreshes initiated by Planful - When Planful does an automatic refresh of the sandbox environment, it copies any Boomi/integration connections.
• Limited to 8 data dimensions in core application
• Add more API connectors to make data integration easier
• ability to transfer sandbox tests to production environment

Incentivized

Our new Comptroller understands the value of Planful, and we plan to utilize it further in the organization to enhance external reporting. Strangely enough, Planful had not previously been embraced by the former CFO, who argued that we were running two sets of books (of course, we were not). Fortunately, the before mentioned reconciliation of EBITDA to Net Income demonstrated that to the banks.

Incentivized

Planful is very easy to use for end users. The budget templates can be customized to meet the business needs. They just released business user experience functionality which you to take a complicated budget template and filter it down to meet departmental needs to avoid sending more lines than needed

Incentivized

I only give a 9 rating rather than a 10 rating because it seems that every day around 2pm we see a slowdown in the use of Planful. I have requested our internal IT department verify that it is not an internal issue and have been assured it is the tool. We have not yet reached out to Planful to do extensive research to solve this issue.

Again, the system is very reliable and, for the most part, runs very quick and smooth. When running larger queries, it does take some time, and during budgeting season our users experienced slower loading times, but nothing that raises concerns outside of normal network issues. Occasionally, as with any software we use, it will crash and you have to restart, but that does not happen very often.

Sometimes we get great help when using Planful's support team and other times we don't. In particular, there is one person that often responds to our support tickets who is less than helpful, hence the reason for the 5 out of 10 rating. As a result, most of the time we reach out to our Planful consulting group as they provide faster and better support

My team has attended training offered several times before/during the Planful Perform conference. This training has been extremely useful and we always learn something we didn't know prior to the training. The trainers are always very knowledgeable and more than willing to help each and every user after the training with specific questions regarding their environment.

Incentivized

This training is much more robust now than it was when we first implemented our Planful environment. Many times we can do a little research in the "help" portal and do not even need to reach out to support. They are continuously improving the training and information available to users.

Incentivized

After going through the initial implementation with Host Analytics and a re-implementation with Cervello (due to an ERP change, not due to a poor initial implementation), I've learned that you really must rely on your internal staff to bear most of the implementation burden. Use the vendor or partners for ideas and best-practice suggestions, and some of the easy-but-time-consuming work. Since you will ultimately be using and maintaining the application, you should be able to do most of it yourself.

Incentivized

Workforce Planning in Planful is a plus compared to Adaptive Insights. Reporting in Planful is a plus compared to Adaptive Insights. Similarity to Excel is a plus compared to Adaptive Insights. Adaptive Insights can budget/forecast weekly or daily rather easily, which is a huge undertaking in Planful. Adaptive Insights has a larger user base and can more easily find talents in Consulting or general users.

Incentivized

From our experience, Planful is only used in 2 overhead departments in our organization. We easily added another overhead department, but they decided against using Planful for their workforce and financial planning. Removing them from our environment was extremely easy.

Incentivized

• Has allowed users to view a real-time P&L in a way they weren't able to do with Qlik.
• Budget to Actual analysis has become much more streamlined and actionable
• Long-range plan process has been significantly streamlined and a lot of time has been cut out of the process.

Incentivized