An Endless Runway of Scalability with Planful

Enterprise scalability is an increasingly important concern for many organizations. In order to stay competitive, organizations must be able to quickly adjust their operations and processes as markets change. To meet this need, companies of all sizes and stages are turning to Planful, which provides dynamic planning capabilities, real-time collaboration, and automated workflows designed to help organizations improve their decision-making processes while reducing manual effort.

Modernizing financial performance management is just as important for growth-stage companies as it is for large enterprises that need to scale the Office of the CFO without adding costs or friction. Big, multi-billion-dollar Planful customers like Zappos and Federated Co-operatives Limited, shared their stories of scaling with Planful at our recent Planful Perform23 event. Let’s explore how Planful has helped these companies improve their financial performance while scaling their finance and accounting capabilities.

In today’s business landscape, organizations need to be able to scale quickly and efficiently to stay competitive and keep up with growth goals while tightly managing costs and resources. To achieve enterprise scalability, they need tools to manage data, processes, and resources more effectively. Planful provides a suite of solutions designed to help organizations reach peak financial performance and enterprise scalability objectives.

Scaling a company has challenges, especially if it’s growing quickly or acquiring new business units and departments. One significant challenge is process integration. With rapid growth or new business units, it’s hard to standardize reporting, consolidate ERPs, and align payroll across these entities without a transition plan. As data increases, tracking, monitoring, and entering data becomes difficult and requires care. Regulatory reporting adds complexity. It’s especially hard when dealing with multiple currencies when expanding internationally or domestically. Keeping track of changes and making sure your finances are accurate is key. Planning for financial resources, coordinating budgets, and managing cash flow without aggregation errors pose significant challenges.

Scaling may also involve merging with a larger company and aligning to their specific needs, introducing further complexities. With Planful, companies can scale through acquisitions while seamlessly integrating new entities, making the acquisition process a non-event by managing financial and operational consolidation. Successfully navigating these obstacles is crucial for companies aiming to scale and thrive in a competitive business landscape.

Planful’s comprehensive planning capabilities allow businesses to quickly adjust plans to account for changes in the market, as well as anticipate and respond to unplanned trends. Real-time collaboration ensures stakeholders can communicate effectively and make informed decisions in partnership with the Office of the CFO and the broader business. Automated workflows streamline processes such as budgeting and forecasting, reducing manual effort along the way.
With Planful, organizations are able to scale financial operations efficiently while still maintaining visibility and decision accuracy.

Zappos is an online retailer that has solidified its position as a household name since its establishment in 1999. With a primary focus on shoes, clothing, and accessories, the company swiftly rose to prominence as one of the most iconic brands on the internet. As it grew and became part of Amazon, the finance department encountered challenges in managing the budgeting and planning process, particularly in consolidating financial data and aligning it with Amazon’s financials.After leveraging a homegrown CFO tool for years, Zappos decided it was time to move to a purpose-built financial performance management solution, selecting Planful as a unified platform with both structured and dynamic planning capabilities, all within an intuitive platform.

After years of laborious manual forecasting in Excel, Planful transformed Zappos’ financial performance management and gained visibility across multiple systems, creating a single source of truth for company hierarchies. This enabled Zappos to access accurate information promptly and complete consolidations in one unified and reliable system.

“What used to be a system for OpEx, a system for CapEx, a system for headcount, a system for top line, it’s now completely in one single source of truth and it’s a one- stop shop for us,” said Jeremy Mann, Director of Finance and Technology at Zappos.

Thanks to Planful, Zappos now plans their financial activities with confidence. The time-consuming process of creating a quick-view OpEx plan based on unreliable data, which once occupied an entire day each quarter, has been drastically streamlined. Zappos can now accomplish their top-down OpEx planning in just one hour.

Jeremy further emphasizes the impact of Planful, stating that this transition has saved up to 15% of analysts’ time—over a thousand hours annually or $65,000 to $70,000 per year. It’s all attributed to the elimination of the manual data pulling process across different systems.

Listen to Jeremy discuss how Planful revolutionized Zappos’ finance operations: How Zappos Found the Perfect Fit with Planful’s Cloud-Based Platform.

Federated Co-operatives Limited (FCL) is a leading energy and retail organization, providing services to more than 4.9 million customers across Western Canada. Sarah Alford, Director, Corporate Accounting, FCL, sat down with us at Perform23 and explained how Planful has given the company the tools to scale.

To keep up with their rapid growth, FCL needed a way to efficiently scale their operations while still improving their decision-making capabilities. Planful was the perfect solution.

Planful provided FCL with the tools needed to remove manual processes and provide scenario planning for their operations. The Planful Platform’s central repository for data collection and analysis allowed users to create targeted simulations that analyzed the impact of different business decisions before they were implemented. This enabled FCL to make more informed decisions and reduce costly mistakes.

​​FCL tackled the complexities of integrating acquired business units, rapid growth and data cleaning, by staging their deployment of business units. This allowed certain business units (Oil & gas, food and agriculture) to transition first, streamlining their processes and data management.

Sarah shared with us that Planful’s advantage over competitors was not just the intuitiveness of the platform, but also the care and concern the Planful team showed for Sarah and her team. Sarah said, “The other systems were more programming in a language I couldn’t connect with. That was a huge differentiator with Planful, both the care and concern the Planful team had for me and my team, and that I could understand how the system was built.”

In addition, Planful’s powerful automation capabilities successfully reduced manual processes such as data entry, consolidation, and financial reporting. This allowed employees at Federated Co-operatives Limited to focus more on providing strategic information, rather than providing financial reports.

“I don’t think we can outgrow Planful,” said Sarah. “Once you get onto the platform, you can’t believe how much it can do.”

Read an interview with Sarah from Perform23 in this report by Constellation Research: “Planful Presents Financial Performance Management as a Team Sport.”

Discover the endless runway of scalability that Planful offers and unlock the potential for your organization’s growth. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to learn from real-world success stories – watch Perform23 content now!