Planful Pros and Cons

Planful stands out as an intuitive system that allows FP&A team to easily create detailed reports and to automate key processes. With its powerful automation features, Planful significantly reduces our time spent on manual tasks, enabling us to focus more on strategic anaysis. This shift not only increases our work efficiency, but also facilitates more informed, data-driven decision making to the senior leadership. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The only downside of Planful is the initial learning curve based on my personal experience. As a beginner, understanding how to create dimensions, cross-check figures, and design report views is quite challenging at the beginning, espcially without sufficient straightforward guideance. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The best part about Planful is all of the time savings & automation features that come along with it. We've been able to shave hundreds of hours off of our work loads by implementing the software into our organization. It was a quick & easy integration and majority of our finance/accounting team uses it on a daily basis. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

In all honesty, there isn't much to dislike about Planful. I've heard feedback from some of our users that the little things are difficult to remember on some of the tools such as SpotlightXL. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Planful is useful for quick to learn users (Dynamic planning should be a better option for most users but has a steeper learning curve) and who want to get month end reporting out of excel and into something more repeatable. It does a good job of bringing systems together to create a forecast (HRIS, database) as long as the data coming from these systems can sit in one place and can be easily tied into other dimensions from your GL. There is always new API add ins like the new one for PowerBI that allow you to diseminate information out of Planful Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Its less versatile for (at least in structured planning) planning by vendor (or any dimension where you have a lot of individual lines). If you have very complicated revenue streams that require many pieces it can be difficult to build and maintain those within planful (structured planning). There is no great tool to get your pieces currently in excel or other into planful so setup time is mostly spent replicating instead of learning to features or improving your reports along the way. Planful has an option called Dynamic Planning that solves a decent amount of the above needs but creates additional complications as its a seperate set of models. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Planful lived up to their advertised "Finance owned" user friendliness and we don't need to rely on IT for basic functionality and report building. Once you learn the basic structure and logic report building is pretty straightforward, quick and easy. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We had consultants build out our budget model, which works as designed, but is more complicated than the basic reporting and budget templates that we helped build and maintain. I'll need to get more comfortable with that part although we have replaced our old Excel based budgeting with the new Planful model. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's way of design (structured planning, substitution variable, dynamic reporting) making the finance process planning budgeting forecasting much easy, saving lots of time and make easier to ensure accuracy. Changed our finance process, you just feed the data into it and it can help you do the calculation consolidation and process once you set up the behind scene structure. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The dynamic planning which host our complicated topline models that data and model is still messy which cannot fully based on the system but excel more. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I best about Planful is its user-friendly interface, which makes it easy to self-manage within the Finance department. Additionally, non-finance end users also find it intuitive and straightforward to use, which greatly enhances overall efficiency and collaboration. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I dislike about Planful is that at times, the system performance can be slow. Additionally, some tools and functions are buried within the system, making them difficult to find. Improving these aspects would greatly enhance the overall user experience Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

For us is the automatic refresh of our reports in Planful from SAP and the way to dig in the data of the reports very helpful and easy to use! We use it almost every week. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Would be nice if you could create and generate reports in Excel Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like that budgeting, reporting, and forecasting are all in one product and that with just a few key drivers, I can plan complex budgets. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I dislike the flexibility of part-time staffing in the workforce planning cube. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

So far, it's been amazing to set up and our frequency has been more and more. Our support from the initital meeting until now has been next level. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Integration has not been as easy at first but we're learning as we go. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Flexibility of reporting and the streamlining of processes that were previously incredibly manual for our team Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Severe lag of model updating during certain times of day Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.