Planful vs. TIS (Treasury Intelligence Solutions)

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.

Incentivized

With this robust treasury tool it is very easy to increase the speed of financial operations with, for example, outgoing payments and cash flow analysis management. Liquidity is not a problem thanks to Treasury Intelligence Solutions, we are confident in this tool to fulfill the most important operations of outgoing payments. I can also recommend it because it is very simple to use and it also has a very simple application.

Incentivized

• 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! 😅

Incentivized

• Bank connectivity is as simple as it can be. Well designed making a complex process a little less complex than other providers.
• Transaction support across 15 countries has been Steller. Broad support for methods and formats and issues were resolved quickly.
• Solid systems interface make connecting with ERP and other systems relatively painless.
• As noted earlier, quite flexible for a hosted service.

• Dashboarding could be more flexible and easier to use.
• Dynamic Reporting has room for flexibility with nesting, dimension names showing up instead of “All,” and overall flexibility.
• Make Analyze view in Spotlight more intuitive.
• A high-level onboarding guide to understanding the different components of Planful, data flows, and tips & tricks.

Incentivized

• User-friendliness in some areas could be improved. A function that explains buttons would be nice, similar to how it is in SAP with F1. But indeed you can find this on the support portal.
• It is missing the Business Discovery Manager. This will solve many questions, so I cannot complain if we are missing a critical dashboard part of TIS. The logic of Master data and download of the same is done nicely. I would like to build my own report with this, but we would be back to BDM functions.
• The BTM transaction monitor is its greatest strength, but also is a large jungle of entries. You can get lost in there. The deletion function should be upgraded if possible, [because] it's not the easiest to do a mass deletion.
• Filtering of accounts that need to be assigned to the BANK link. It's only a small thing but can be super annoying every time it selects the first bank entry by default.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Depends on stage of the project if it will be postponed in 2023. Se la vie. Will be happy to go on.

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.

Incentivized

The main feature of usability is the outcome you get upon actions done. TIS is not complecated solution - it is rational and has most needed capabilites for cash management via multiple accounts in different jurisdictions. It works well for this task and evolutioning to the field of risk management to get all treasury job done well.

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.

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.

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

Offered support information in the portal (knowledge base articles) as well members of the support provides a very good service level.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The training addressed our needs.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

The cloud connection meant less work for IT. The setup of the first 1000 accounts was very quick, so we went live after only 4 months.

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

Incentivized

The implementation team is strong and supportive of your needs which was important. The solution fit the needs of company very well with many ERP systems and bank accounts. The company was continuing to improve its product based on customer feedback. Strong IT background at the top

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Has allowed users to view a real-time P&L in a way they weren't able to do with Qlik.
• Budget to Actual analysis has become much more streamlined and actionable
• Long-range plan process has been significantly streamlined and a lot of time has been cut out of the process.

Incentivized

In terms of risk mitigation of course we can reduce the number of people having access to banking if not needed. With dedicated teams and less people with access to individual Bank portals. Before access to bank portals were necessary for all sorts of manual payments and exceptions if we really implement the 100% of functions and dont leave exceptions that risk mitigation can be achieved and efficiency at automated payment runs.

• At a large corporation with more than 60 entities and 400+ bank accounts, the savings and improvements are massive considering how time-consuming the manual work would be. I don't have any numbers to quote, unfortunately.
• We are now massively expanding our TIS with the full integration of automated payment runs. This has larger operational impacts, like the possible consolidation of banking and dedicated payment teams.

Incentivized