Planful is amazing!
Updated June 28, 2024

Planful is amazing!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Structured Planning
  • Reporting

Overall Satisfaction with Planful

We use Planful for workforce planning, reporting, budgeting and forecasting. The biggest challenge we had when we started using Planful was the ability to do our workforce planning because we lacked the ability to limit access based on our cost center structure. Planful gives us the ability to use real numbers (not blended rates) because of the structured access permissions.

Pros

  • Customer Service
  • Dynamic Reporting
  • Workforce Planning
  • Help menu/resources

Cons

  • The ability to create a dashboard for all to see top level financial results but no ability to drill through
  • We do not calculate ROIs for tools like this, however it has enabled us to meet our budget every year due to visibility of financials for all of our money managers
We are an over head department and simply use Planful for operational expenses and workforce planning. The impact on our ability to collaborate financials across the department has been tremendous! We have the ability to simply export our forecast report and send to Home Office when requested, making my job much easier. Also putting the data at the fingertips of 20+ money managers is very valuable.
We have benefitted greatly from having the ability to take care of all of our finance needs in Planful. It is very valuable to have the ability to see workforce templates and opex templates with ease for our money managers. It would be even more beneficial if all of our overhead departments used the tool, as that would ease a LOT of work done by home office accounting.
I was not involved in the selection process, but have owned Planful as a FP&A tool since its infancy.

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?

Yes

Did implementation of Planful go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Planful again?

Yes

The Planful solution has been very well suited for our workforce planning. The ability to forecast/budget real numbers rather than having to use blended rates is super important for us. This reduces the number of variances. Additionally, the ease of setting up compensation items for all of our benefits and assigning those to employee types is wonderful.

Planful Feature Ratings

10.0
Long-term financial planning
10
Financial budgeting
10
Forecasting
10
Scenario modeling
10
Management reporting
10
10.0
Financial data consolidation
10
Journal entries and reports
10
Multi-currency management
10
Intercompany Eliminations
10
Minority Ownership
10
Local and consolidated reporting
10
Detailed Audit Trails
10
10.0
Financial Statement Reporting
10
Management Reporting
10
Excel-based Reporting
10
Automated board and financial reporting
10
10.0
Personalized dashboards
10
Color-coded scorecards
10
KPIs
10
Cost and profitability analysis
10
Key Performance Indicator setting
10
10.0
Flat file integration
10
Excel data integration
10
Direct links to 3rd-party data sources
10
10.0
Pixel Perfect reports
10
Customizable dashboards
10
Report Formatting Templates
10
10.0
Drill-down analysis
10
Formatting capabilities
10
Report sharing and collaboration
10
10.0
Publish to Web
10
Publish to PDF
10
Report Versioning
10
Report Delivery Scheduling
10
10.0
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
10
Predictive Analytics
10
10.0
Multi-User Support (named login)
10
Role-Based Security Model
10
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
10
Report-Level Access Control
10
Single Sign-On (SSO)
10
10.0
Responsive Design for Web Access
10
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
10

Planful Features and Attributes

During our first couple of years with Planful, support wasn't very reliable, but over the years it has turned into an amazing experience. The resources offered for support are terrific, and when/if you do have to contact the support team, they've all been wonderful to work with.
Planful is very easy to learn and use on a daily basis. You have the ability to customize the system to meet your needs, and support does a great job assisting with this.
This has been a game changer for us! It gives us the ability to access realtime financial and workforce data at not just my Finance team's fingertips, but all of our money managers as well!
There are some things we would like to do to ensure more data accuracy, like link the SAP HR data to push into Planful similar to what we're doing with financial data, however we have run into issues simply because we've been doing workforce planning in Planful since 2018 and have customized it so much that the data no longer links directly with what is in SAP
A few years ago we were trying to figure out the workforce calculations based on the employee's base wages and all of the compensation items we have built in the system. We (my finance team) could never recreate the calculations to prove to our money managers that the system was calculating correctly. We reached out to support and they jumped on a call with us. They showed us a few tricks we didn't know about and sent us an excel sheet also to help us validate that Planful was calculating correctly. Once we had that call, the data was easy to align and show our money managers that they can be confident with Planful and the calculations taking place in the system.

Using Planful

52 - Technology Group (IT Dept) and Business Services (a/p, a/r, etc.)
2 - My team member and I are the super users for Planful. We often times deal with issues with data when it isn't pushing correctly from our ERP system (broken on our side, not Planful's) and user issues such as a user that has gone inactive. We also manage the hierarchies in Planful. When a new order comes through, we have to name it and put it into the appropriate place in our order hierarchy.
  • Workforce planning
  • budgeting
  • rolling forecast
  • reporting
  • test scenarios for "what if" cases
  • Hoping to add a vendor dimension to make our planning even more granular
  • hoping eventually to get HR data linked from our ERP to workforce planning for ease of data management
We're going through the renewal process right now. Our organization's success with meeting our budget year over year is very much due to the use of Planful and the ability to see our financial data daily, at our fingertips.

Evaluating Planful and Competitors

Yes - Custom built excel tool
  • Cloud Solutions
  • Integration with Other Systems
  • Ease of Use
I was not involved with the decision to purchase Planful, but I will tell you that in addition to the three I've selected above, another factor was cost.
The only thing I would change (even though I wasn't involved in selecting the tool) would be the 3rd party we used for our implementation. Otherwise, I love Planful and how it works.

Planful Implementation

I would have chosen a different implementation partner, and I believe the experience would have been 100% better.
  • Third-party professional services
RSM
Change management was minimal - Ask lots of questions. Our partner was not very efficient and several changes had to take place to our environment after implementation as we learned more about Planful's capabilities.
If you can connect financial and workforce data during implementation, do it.
  • none, issues were discovered after the implementation partner was no longer involved.

Planful Training

  • Online Training
  • In-Person Training
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.
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.

Configuring Planful

We have not experienced any challenges with Planful's configurability.
Nothing that I can think of at this time.
No - we have not done any custom code
Nothing that I can think of at this time.

Planful Support

ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
I do not know.

Using Planful

ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Lots to learn
  • Dynamic Reporting
  • Task Manager
  • Building templates
  • at first, column sets were difficult

Planful Reliability

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.
I have never experienced unplanned outages or glitches in the system that I can recall. The system is extremely reliable, and if there are going to be outages, they are always well communicated and planned out.
We now have 9 years of data in the system for financial actuals, along with 2 overhead departments using the system and we do not experience major issues with pages loading.

Integrating Planful

As far as I know, the integration process was very simple. I know that since we implemented, Planful has made many improvements to this, we just haven't had the need to utilize the options.
  • SAP
We simply integrated Planful with SAP to pull in our financial actuals. This did not take long. Occasionally, the data contains characters that will not pull through to Planful and we have to reach out to our internal IT department to assist in fixing the transactional data, but everything flows through very well daily.
  • none at this time
  • Single Signon
I'm unsure how to answer this question, as I'm not positive what technologies we use. I know we have single signon, but would this also include Boomi to push data from SAP to Planful?
None, as I do not have enough knowledge to intelligently help other users.

Relationship with Planful

All of the Planful employees are wonderful and very easy to work with.
Everyone at Planful has been extremely helpful when needed. They treat their customers like family. They are very inclusive and listen to what customers have to say.
I was not involved in contract negotiations with the vendor.
I've seen cost savings going with a 3 year agreement rather than annual. I would recommend this.

Upgrading Planful

Comments

More Reviews of Planful

  1. Home
  2. Corporate Performance Management (CPM) Software
  3. Planful Reviews
  4. User Review of Planful