Planful Announces “Planful Now” Offering to Provide High Impact ROI and Rapid Time to Value for Customers

Planful Inc. (formerly Host Analytics), leading financial planning and analysis (FP&A) cloud platform provider, announced its “Planful Now” package offering at the Planful Virtual Tour, providing a significant advantage to organizations in uncertain times. As businesses around the world confront the economic fallout from the COVID-19 crisis, the ability to make data-driven decisions quickly is more important than ever.

Customer stories shared at the Planful Virtual Tour, such as those from The Boston Red Sox, Bose, and Nature’s Sunshine, and newly unveiled capabilities and functionality underscore how the Planful team will deliver on its vision to provide high impact ROI and rapid time to value, supplying the Continuous Planning platform businesses need to make fast, agile, and confident decisions.

“The conventional wisdom in the industry is that even a fast cloud FP&A software deployment will take months, but with Planful, we were up and running with our Sales and Tradespend forecast templates in three weeks,” said Cheryl Chow, Senior Finance Manager at SmartyPants, a fast-growing vitamin company. “Planful provided amazingly fast time to value, enabling the FP&A team to plan their quarterly forecast following Q1 close, prepare for an upcoming board meeting, and create new forecasts for sales, advertising, and other areas without breaking our stride.”

For companies that are assessing their next moves in today’s business climate, Planful Now accelerates the implementation of critical FP&A use cases and provides flexible options for expanding the platform across the business over time, as customers progress on their Continuous Planning journey. Planful customers have found success by starting with use cases such as:

• Cash Flow Forecasting projects future financial liquidity and cash flow to ensure business continuity and smart allocation of capital.
• Multi-dimensional Ad Hoc Analysis supplies the right data to the right people at the right time. These self-service reporting capabilities provide visibility and clarity into business performance and socializes information company-wide so that finance and business leaders in every corner of the business have the insights they need to make confident decisions.
• Workforce Planning standardizes workforce compensation calculations across the organization and provides flexibility to quickly forecast multiple scenarios by changing employee cost drivers and immediately understanding the overall financial impact on the business.
• Monthly Close & Consolidation accelerates close cycles, empowers finance with the robust financial and regulatory reporting they need, and provides the business with immediate performance feedback to re-assess and pivot operations based on changing conditions.
• Financial Reporting enables Finance to quickly create and distribute accurate financial regulatory reporting packages for the various internal and external stakeholders who rely on these reports.
• Annual Operating Plan (AOP) enables FP&A teams to easily build collaborative financial plans that align company-wide resources to strategic goals and objectives. Companies can quickly turn an AOP in a quarterly or monthly rolling forecast and model hundreds of different scenarios quickly and reliably to determine how to change course, as conditions change throughout the year.

Daily user activity in the Planful platform jumped more than 25% amongst current customers, since the beginning of the pandemic, demonstrating the increased importance of driving faster and more collaborative planning and decision-making cycles, and that a Continuous Planning platform like Planful makes this possible.

“Speed and agility in decision-making are more important than ever,” said Planful CEO Grant Halloran. “The COVID-19 crisis caught everyone off guard, and now companies are regrouping. We’ve been in touch with our FP&A community throughout this crisis, and we know that providing their boards and leaders with options based on accurate, timely data as quickly as possible is top of mind for them. We’ve always worked closely with FP&A teams to meet their unique needs, and Planful Now is an extension of that—a commitment to remove the friction from the implementation process and start delivering ROI impact immediately.”