Plan Confidently, Close Faster, Report Accurately: Planful

The Silicon Review

In the past few years, companies have seen drastic increases in the pace of change, the aggressiveness of competitors, the frequency of disruption, and the amount of data being captured. It all leads to organizational and technological friction. Yet finance and accounting leaders are asked to be strategic advisors to the business while being stuck in manual processes, slowed by remote teams, and unable to guide the business towards the future. It’s clear that businesses as usual⁠—slow close and consolidation, incomplete reports, unreliable planning and forecasting⁠—is no longer an option. The Office of the CFO can, however, thrive in this changing environment. But you need fast and accurate insights, the ability to quickly iterate on plans, and an efficient allocation of resources. We have entered the Golden Age of the CFO, where now is the time to invest in the modern technology you need to transform your function and your business.

A comprehensive solution with end-to-end capabilities for finance and accounting teams. Planful works for the Office of the CFO, helping them become more nimble, quickly deliver accurate plans and financial reports, and guide the business with critical insights. Planful Inc., the pioneer of financial performance management cloud software, today announced exceptionally strong momentum through the first half of 2022. Multiple growth records were achieved including customers added, subscription bookings, and customer retention rates. The company also held a successful in-person Perform conference in Las Vegas.

Subscription bookings beat the previous best-ever quarter by more than 20%, while customer expansion bookings surged 41% year-over-year as customers continue to extract more value from Planful, expanding use cases to all corners of the business. Planful’s channel business continued its impressive growth, increasing bookings by 47% year-over-year, expanding the partner network by 25%, and adding new customers around the globe, including: Speedcast Communications Inc, Mejuri, Tea Forté, Globo, Togetherwork, and Carbon Health.

Planful and its employees continued to receive industry and analyst recognition in the first half of the year, including:

The company earned Great Place to Work® certification for its operations in the U.S., Canada, India, and the UK.
Planful Predict was also recognized as a finalist for a prestigious CODiE Award in the “Best Emerging Technology” category.
Planful’s People team earned a Gold Globee® award for “Human Resources Department of the Year”.
Both Planful and CEO Grant Halloran won Stevie Awards for the second consecutive year in the “Company of the Year — Financial Services” and “Maverick of the Year” categories.
Planful earned top product scores from the Business Application Research Center (BARC) in the “Financial Performance Management” and “Integrated Planning and Analytics” categories.
Planful was named an Experience Leader in the 2022 Dresner Advisory Services’ Wisdom of Crowds® report.

“The first half of 2022 was another big step upward for the Planful team, partners, and customers,” said CEO Grant Halloran. “This momentum is a result of a ton of innovation and business operations transformation in the last few years. Finance and accounting professionals are desperate to modernize their data and process infrastructure, and do that in a very cost effective and speedy manner. Our team and partners are making that possible and I’m really proud of the hard work they continue to do on behalf of our customers.”- Grant Halloran, CEO

Intelligent Financial Decision Making

Predict: Projections allows planners to create trusted forecasts that link plans to business outcomes without bias. It uses a proprietary mix of AI and machine learning algorithms to generate a forecast that reflects the inherent trends, seasonality, and other variables the Planful AI engine has learned from historical data.

Andrew Chatfield, Planful’s Chief Product Officer, noted “The majority of AI solutions are unable to handle the nuances of financial data, such as negative values, missing periods, and intersectional, calculated data. This is why we spent two years of R&D to build our own proprietary AI engine upon which the Predict suite of applications is built.”

A Human In The Loop (HITL) capability in Predict: Projections gives users the ability to leverage the AI-generated forecast or adjust the AI-generated projections to their preference when finalizing forecast numbers. A detailed, visual context around projected numbers and adjustments makes the AI generated values easily understandable to end users, enabling them to compare actuals, AI-generated projections, and adjusted projections to make faster, informed decisions. Planful’s reimagined business user experience is a major step forward in the preparation of accurate, actionable forecasts and budgets. By sharing smart templates with business teams, Finance can rapidly expedite the data gathering and aggregation process as well as minimize the need for data requests and repeated manual follow-ups. This allows everyone to focus more of their time on high-value analysis and less on menial, manual, and error-prone work. Business users can use this new experience to work on budgets and plans knowing the context behind the numbers. The collaborative aspect of the new capability eliminates much of the friction caused when business users are forced to work with confusing or inaccurate data, which saves hours while increasing forecast accuracy.

Grant Halloran, CEO