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
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Information Technology (Construction company, 10,001+ employees)
Planful is currently used by our Technology Group, an overhead department in the company. Additionally, Kiewit Business Services, another overhead department utilizes the tool. We have other departments that have observed how easy Planful is to use and how successful we have been with meeting our budget, and they have asked for information on how to utilize it as well. We use Planful for workforce planning, budgeting, forecasting, and reporting. Kiewit's use of this program is unique in the sense that we do not use Planful for income statements and balance sheets or for any manufacturing or international currency needs. As an overhead department, we do not utilize all of its features.
Pros
Workforce planning is amazing. We can personalize each record, and updating is very simple.
The ability to have a rolling forecast is very useful for us in an overhead department. It enables us to pull up information on what we are forecasting for company IT costs for the upcoming years.
The flexibility of the program and the reporting has been extremely helpful for us.
They customer service is 2nd to NONE!
Their willingness to improve their tool based on feedback from business user groups, customer advisory boards and their planful engage program is absolutely amazing.
Cons
Dashboards need improvements. It would be nice to have a VIEW ONLY ability to push a dashboard to select users at the top level of finances for the group.
Dated Hierarchies are cumbersome and not as helpful as they could be. There is so much opportunity with dated hierarchies, especially during re-organizations and budgeting.
Likelihood to Recommend
I am constantly talking about Planful and the benefits of using the system. I have been on numerous calls for Planful with possible clients, and I am always honest about how well the program works and how happy we are. Planful is flexible, and when changes are needed to our environment, Planful developers are always happy to help and walk us through all necessary scenarios.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Information Technology (Construction company, 10,001+ employees)
We are using Planful to manage our overhead forecasts + headcount (+$50M annually) and monthly reporting of the overhead costs to the department heads. It resolved a problem of multiple spreadsheets being emailed to the end users and back to finance team. It provided accountability at the end user side and the finance side with a single source for the truth.
Pros
Headcount tracking and cost
Reduced cycle time on forecasting from spreadsheets
Tracking of where the end user is in the forecast process
SpotlightXL (the Excel Add-in) makes reporting easier in Excel
Cons
The Reporting module is not intuitive for end user and finance admin team plus very limited in formatting
Admin tools for setting up end users is challenge - many different areas to go to set someone up on the system
Likelihood to Recommend
I think Planful has a lot potential and the Planful team is actively working on improving it. We use it just for overhead forecasting and reporting. It was a perfect tool to move us from a spreadsheet process with errors and single sources for the truth. We had a well defined process, so it was easy adapt into the Planful system.
VU
Verified User
Director in Finance and Accounting (Construction company, 1001-5000 employees)
We keep Host within our finance department to load the data and create reports to push out to the rest of the company. We also use it for planning.
Pros
Reporting is very quick and easy to consolidate information.
The planning and HR modules slashes the time to create forecasts and plans tremendously.
Cons
They could offer more dimensions because 13 make it very limiting.
It was frustrating converting some report books, which they deprecated, to report collections because of the 10 tab limit. If they could find a way to work around this that would be great.
The new report sets are a great feature but could use some more work with the precedence columns. It is always a guess and check and when using both a row and a column set, you don't always get what you want for formatting.
