Product Review: Planful
Planful embraces Excel to give users the best of both worlds
Over the past year we’ve been on the search for a planning solution that can achieve the same connected planning vision as Anaplan while being more accessible to the mid-market.
We researched, demoed, and built models in several different products. There are a number of compelling options out there right now, especially for businesses optimizing for a simple and lightweight solution. One solution in particular stood out to us, and it came from an unexpected place.
Founded in 2000, Host Analytics was a long-established player in the EPM space with a clear focus on finance and accounting. With the rise of Anaplan and connected planning across the business, Host was largely overshadowed by its flashier unicorn counterpart. However, four years ago Host rebranded to Planful and completely overhauled their product and brand. Their product development has been firing on all cylinders as they modernized their core finance and accounting offerings. It turns out you can teach an old dog new tricks.
After working with Planful over the last few months, we decided to recommend it to one of our long-term clients (a $150M B2B SaaS business) and help them successfully transition. We do not take the endorsement of a new tech solution lightly, but we feel very confident around Planful for several reasons:
Excel-native everything: for the past decade most software companies have been focused on killing spreadsheets and getting everyone into one cloud platform. But if you come at the king, you best not miss. In reality, Excel and other spreadsheets have shown tremendous staying power and are perhaps even more entrenched than they were before. Planful embraces Excel, allowing customers to not only report and analyze in Excel but design and build entire models from scratch in Excel. No need to learn a new web application, new formula syntax, or new shortcuts. This allows for much broader adoption with not only finance but non-finance folks as well.
Powerful Excel add-in: most folks who have been in Finance long enough know that Smart View is arguably still the best planning add-in that’s ever existed. Most cloud solutions have not invested in add-ins to steer people into web apps. Planful has the closest thing to Smart View that we’ve seen, and it feels great for ad hoc analysis and reporting.
Enterprise-grade power: don’t let the Excel interface fool you: Planful has a powerful engine behind it that feels like the best of Essbase and Anaplan put together. You can create larger models with 10+ dimensions and trillions of cells a la Essbase or connect many smaller models together like Anaplan. And since Planful allows for more optimization of the architecture and calculations, there is no additional charge for model size or workspace.
Pre-built apps: while Dynamic Planning allows for unlimited flexibility, Planful still covers foundational areas like headcount planning, budgeting, and reporting out-of-the-box. Planful’s workforce planning functionality actually works - it’s not just a template, demo, or consultant-built accelerator. These apps save time and budget upfront so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
Cost-effective: Planful’s pricing is accessible even for <$50M revenue customers, they don’t charge for storage or usage, and most customers don’t have or need dedicated Planful resources. This is the type of value proposition that we seek for our clients.
Microsoft connectivity: in addition to Excel, Planful’s approach opens up a wealth of opportunity to leverage Microsoft Power Platform, Copilot, Azure, and other powerful tools. A sales leader could collect weekly rep forecasts with a simple Power App. A portfolio manager could sync 100 unique, business-owned Excel workbooks into a model and grant access to consolidated results with one process. A product owner could build an entire model with Copilot prompts. Data could be synced into Azure to train internal AI models. The benefits of more data-centricity are massive.
For all of these reasons and more, we couldn’t be more excited to add Planful to our repertoire and continue to help clients succeed with collaborative planning as we all move into a new era of not only planning technology but technology overall.