Planful is a cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM) suite. It includes financial applications for modeling, planning, consolidation, reporting and analytics.
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Wolters Kluwer CCH® Tagetik
Score 8.5 out of 10
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Tagetik is a corporate performance management solution that unifies budgeting, financial planning, consolidation and management reporting. Tagetik is offered as SaaS, on a private cloud, or on-premise, and can migrate between deployments as needed.
Reporting and Spotlight have changed the game for us. Spotlight has brought dynamic reporting to our team and the rest of the office as well. With dynamic planning, we've spent more time doing analysis instead of running and creating the reports. Recently, we've spent less time analyzing and more time formatting, and Spotlight has brought the analysis back to FP&A.
Well suited for large multi-entity international, multi-currency, multi GAAP groups with excellent report writing features, customizations, and validation traps with minimal IT support. The ability to customize dimensions and dimension structures is a key strength. The intuitive user interface enables easy adoption by new users and training times are short. Upload features via embedded customisable ETL and standardised Excel templates are very efficient. Error checking is intuitive and helpful. Less appropriate for small single entity businesses.
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! 😅
Processes are clearly described in CCH Tagetik ; users can easily find where they are and which action they have to make
Interaction with Excel is really fluid ; the Excel add-in is easy to deploy and to updgrade, in the hand of users. It is reliable provided the internet connection is fast.
Managing hierachies is obvious in CCH Tagetik. Hierarchies are fundamental for a good reporting ; CCH Tagetik has obviously a deep experience of this feature.
SaaS : our experience with CCH Tagetik is of only 1 year, but it technically performs well, the system is reponsive, no shut-down, and updates (every quarter) do not disturb production.
AIH seems to be able to manage very large quantity of data, and to provide advanced analysis functionalities. We did not have time to explore them.
The steps of setting up the loading of data is slightly painful.
The steps and error message while connecting the process workflow has to provide a hint on which area needed to be fixed (because it could be anywhere or anything).
The combination of 2 segments for the excel upload on what's needed to eliminate is yet to resolved. Which made the entire list very long.
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.
Based on our business requirements, its current implementation and way of use (in terms of the efficiceny) it's more than certain that we will renew our contract with CCH Tagetik. CCH Tagetik increased our efficiency regarding reporting and provides more features which made it easier to take decisions. Besides of that, it provided he best solutions for reporting according to the Solvency II standards. Since this is still the case, it is also a reason to stay with CCH Tagetik.
The tool is extremely adaptable, and it enables very quick querying to give us opportunity to gain live insights into the business. Given its adaptability, we are also able to create scenario analyses very quickly in rapidly changing environments. The formatting also enables us to provide this information in a very consumable manner.
On a general level, it is a flexible, streamlined system, that can integrate operational data with accounting data for a better financial overview and budget planning. Reporting wise, the types and the amount of data analysis available or that can be created are close to endless. Having a quicker, more flexible way of analysing data certainly means better, faster reporting and better use of the data itself.
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.
CCH Tagetik has alwyas been there in case we need help. In almost 20 years of commercial relationship, I have no evidence of times in which they were not available to answer a question or to solve an issue linked to their products, timely and efficiently.
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.
As you can see, speed depends on the applications but also on the hardware that runs them. As far as CCH Tagetik improved, we saw the benefit of a cloud-based solution which could solve many speed performance issues.
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
I have had the pleasure of attending some courses at the dutch offices of CCH Tagetik. These were very educational with excellent trainers, a very enjoyable accomodation and they helped me a lot with regards to starting to use CCH Tagetik.
We got little training on the tool after implementation. Did a lot of "trial by fire" learning about Planful. I don't think RSM really provided us all the details we needed to understand the tool and to know what we needed to train on. I don't know we knew enough about the tool to even ask the right questions and then they left and we used Planful support a lot.
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.
Online training is the only form of training we could deploy during the pandemic. This service has been nonethless delivered with the same standards and the same results of the traditional training procedures.
Most of the issues in the implementation were self inflicted, the team at Top Down was great and did a good job managing hours and teaching our team how to best handle the system. The implementation went longer than expected as they always do but the GL and erp link was up and running quickly so we could build reporting
we did it in a coaching model. This allowed us to have 2 key advantages: we got to know the system very well and managed to save on the implementation cost. This worked well, was maybe a bit slower since we had to do this in our spare time. Nevertheless I strongly recommand
Personally I have only used essbase in my work. Planful has a much easier platform to use both to put together results and to load data compared to the financial reporting platforms that I have used. Planful also has better dedicated tools to create reports and build in a dedicated software that is built to report on rather than building from scratch in an excel environment
Oracle Essbase is another EPM software that we used but compared to Tagetik, it's not user friendly and the creation of dimensions and describing rules are more technically difficult. Drill down and analysis are not as easy as double clicking on Cch tagetik for immediate information. But as I have not used this software much and tagetik more, this is all I can say
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.
A good and performing scalability both on a geographical and a legal entity scale. The link with MS Office suite allows an easy deployment of the application, especially for contributors.
It has definitely helped to standardize reporting across the company. Teams are able to pull the same reports and everything has the same feel to it.
Since there are so many standard reports that we are able to create, it makes the analysts jobs easier since they are not spending so much time re-creating reports.
With any system, there is going to be some admin work required. Creating new reports, accounts and entities does take time, but it is fairly simple and doesn't take a ton of time.
