Six months ago, I was honored to become the CEO of Host Analytics. Since then, I’ve met with many of our customers. These businesses are the heart of our economy, driving progress as they compete and innovate for the benefit of their customers, employees, and shareholders.
In these visits, no matter the geography or industry or size of the company, I kept hearing about how our capabilities impacted our customers’ philosophy toward financial planning.
I heard that our platform didn’t just help our customers do their jobs better… it helped them shift their mentality around the concept of financial planning. They became not just better at planning, but more interested in planning, more aware of the benefits of planning. They started thinking about planning as an organizational value, a key part of their culture.
They became more planful.
Our previous name, Host Analytics, served us well since our inception in 2001 — we started off hosting machines in our customers’ offices to run FP&A, and we were the first company to bring FP&A automation to the cloud.
Nearly two decades later, we have clearly evolved our capabilities, our perspective, and our vision.
With the help of our software, our customers have accelerated their financial close and consolidation cycles by over 80 percent. They’re now better able to respond to sudden changes, unforeseen circumstances, and emerging opportunities by planning dynamically. And the business is making decisions more frequently, quickly, and confidently.
‘Planful’ is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “full of plans” — organized, systematic, thoughtful. We felt there was no better word to describe our customers’ mindsets, aligning well with the type of impact we can help them achieve in their organizations.
Allow us to reintroduce ourselves: we are now Planful, and we exist to empower confident and impactful financial decisions – be them large and strategic, or small and tactical.
All that said, our customers will experience zero interruptions to their service or subscription, with no action required on their part. Our emphasis on planning and decision-making does not mean we are shifting our focus from financial consolidation. We believe accelerating financial close and reporting cycles is critical to driving faster, more confident, and more impactful planning and decision cycles… you can’t do one without the other.
As I’ve seen with our customers, once relieved of the labor-intensive, time-consuming, and error-prone burden of spreadsheets (or other homegrown tools), the finance team is able to focus more of its energy on being strategic advisors to all facets of the business.
The business, in turn, starts benefitting from those financial insights and elevating its financial IQ, as business leaders start making more informed decisions, with more confidence and agility. The entire company starts moving more proactively, more strategically, and more collaboratively.
Our customers became planful — and now we’re becoming Planful.
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