Try Planful for a great budget planning experience!
October 08, 2021

Try Planful for a great budget planning experience!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Planning
  • Reporting and Analytics

Overall Satisfaction with Planful (formerly Host Analytics)

We use Planful for all of our budget planning and reporting needs. Planful is used across our whole organization with the heaviest users in Finance and Accounting. In many cases, we give budget owners the option to access Planful and take accountability for their budget planning. Planful is much easier than maintaining multiple Excel spreadsheets for multiple users.

Pros

  • Always releasing system updates that improve the user experience.
  • HR planning in Planful is great.
  • Offering an annual user conference.

Cons

  • Dashboarding module did not offer great visualization.
  • Drilling through on actuals reports would be better if you could select multiple months at a time.
  • I wish you could customize the columns in HR planning and the changes would save from month to month.
  • Time saved.
  • Improved financial decision-making.
  • More rapid reporting, planning, and month-end cycles.
Planful has helped us simplify and automate our monthly and yearly forecasting cycles by creating one timeline for all users and reducing many manual processes. We are now able to complete our annual budget planning in September of each year instead of January of the current year. Automation is a huge timesaver.
Building a new report from scratch would be quite difficult unless you're an expert in Planful. However, the beauty of Planful is that you can easily and quickly create a copy of a similar report and modify the copy to meet your needs. My company tried Dashboards for one year but discontinued that module due to lack of use and capabilities.
For anyone in the Finance and Accounting world, it is easy to complete self-serve reporting, analytics, and planning in Planful. Once in a while if I get stumped, I reach out to our Planful admin to assist with updating reports or updating the hierarchy to reflect org structure changes. I would recommend Planful to finance folks.
Before my company implemented Host Analytics in 2015, we were using Business Objects Reporting, which was much slower and more cumbersome. For dashboards and visualization, we use PowerBI and ServiceNow, which offer more visual capabilities than Planful.

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?

Yes

Would you buy Planful again?

Yes

Planful is great for any company whether it has 50 or 5,000 employees. Planful integrates really well with our HR system, Workday, to load employee data. We prefer to limit Planful users to Director-level or above and keep most of the updates completed by our FP&A team. This saves time and energy. We consider Planful to be the source of truth for actual expense.

Planful Feature Ratings

Long-term financial planning
10
Financial budgeting
10
Forecasting
10
Scenario modeling
10
Management reporting
Not Rated
Financial data consolidation
8
Journal entries and reports
10
Multi-currency management
Not Rated
Intercompany Eliminations
Not Rated
Minority Ownership
Not Rated
Local and consolidated reporting
Not Rated
Detailed Audit Trails
10
Financial Statement Reporting
Not Rated
Management Reporting
Not Rated
Excel-based Reporting
9
Automated board and financial reporting
9
Personalized dashboards
Not Rated
Color-coded scorecards
Not Rated
KPIs
Not Rated
Cost and profitability analysis
10
Key Performance Indicator setting
Not Rated
Not Rated
Flat file integration
Not Rated
Excel data integration
Not Rated
Direct links to 3rd-party data sources
Not Rated
Pixel Perfect reports
Not Rated
Customizable dashboards
Not Rated
Report Formatting Templates
Not Rated
Drill-down analysis
9
Formatting capabilities
8
Report sharing and collaboration
6
Publish to Web
Not Rated
Publish to PDF
10
Report Versioning
Not Rated
Report Delivery Scheduling
8
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
Not Rated
Predictive Analytics
Not Rated
Multi-User Support (named login)
10
Role-Based Security Model
10
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
10
Single Sign-On (SSO)
10
Responsive Design for Web Access
Not Rated
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
Not Rated

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