ANALYST THINKING MODE

AI that connects the numbers and explains what’s driving them

Your CFO’s question rarely ends with one number. Thinking Mode in Planful AI Analyst works through complex questions across your reports, explains the drivers, and turns the findings into a narrative your team can review and build on. Save the approach as a Recipe and run it again next month.

See Thinking Mode in action

Most anomaly detection tools stop at the alert. Signals closes the gap between flagging an issue and understanding it. Your team no longer spends hours digging through data to find the root cause and where to focus next.

Find the drivers, not just the variance

Analyst handles the lookups, report building, and variance analysis that usually take hours, so your team can focus on decisions instead of preparing data.

Get the story with the numbers

Ask a question and get a clear answer with the chart, narrative, and logic behind it. Explore results, drill into drivers, and share outputs directly from one view.

Stop rebuilding the same analysis

Recipes turn your team’s approach into a repeatable playbook. Save the reports, instructions, materiality thresholds and output format behind a review, then use the same approach next period or share it with your team.

Review the work behind the answer

See the analysis plan and steps, check the findings against your reports, and ask follow-up questions or add business context in the same conversation.

We treat Planful AI as another analyst on our team that fields questions about our financial data quickly and delivers answers we trust. Planful makes us even faster. For our day-three accrual reviews at month-end close, which previously took a couple of hours, AI Thinking Mode does it in two minutes and provides more details.

Adam Hoffer,Senior Financial Planning & Analysis Manager at Integrate

Follow the variance to what’s driving it

Thinking Mode works across your selected reports to connect the numbers and uncover what’s driving performance. It compares results, identifies material variances, and brings the key drivers together across accounts, departments, or product lines. Instead of piecing together findings from multiple reports, your team gets a clear starting point.

Turn the findings into the full story

The analysis isn’t finished when you find the variance. Thinking Mode brings the findings together in a structured narrative: what’s going well, what’s off track, and what needs attention. Tables, charts and suggested next steps give finance a first draft to check, add context to, and use in leadership conversations.

Save the impact and repeat it

Your monthly review shouldn’t start with a blank prompt. A Recipe saves your team’s playbook: which reports to use, the steps to follow, what counts as material, and what the final summary should include. Build one from an analysis or customize a Planful sample, then run it for the next period and share the approach across your team. Each user’s existing permissions still apply.

What’s coming next?

Deeper analysis is the starting point. Soon, bring the findings into your plan and the materials you use to communicate it.

Thinking Mode writeback coming soon

Move from discussing a change to updating the plan. Thinking Mode will support writing changes back into Planful, helping your team carry analysis into the planning workflow with less manual re-entry.

Board-ready outputcoming soon

Bring the numbers and narrative together in output designed for board and leadership reviews, reducing the work between completing the analysis and preparing the presentation.

Less time assembling the analysis. More time moving the conversation forward.

See how Thinking Mode helps your team investigate performance, explain the drivers, and make recurring analysis repeatable,—all inside Planful.