Planful Summer 2020 release: faster, smarter, and more collaborative than ever

We believe that FP&A is the strategic core of every modern business. When finance teams work faster and more efficiently, they have more time to raise the financial IQ in every corner of the business. Helping FP&A connect and collaborate with the business is one of the most powerful benefits of Continuous Planning, and our Summer 2020 release takes that further than ever.

Summer20, now available to all Planful customers, builds on the capabilities of our industry-first Dynamic Collaboration launched in Spring20. It also brings a completely redesigned workforce planning experience, significant improvements to platform speed and performance, enhanced Support Portal access, dozens of new customizations, and a range of usability improvements. Here’s what’s new.

All-new workforce planning experience

Current uncertainties have made workforce planning a challenge at many companies. With our goal of getting FP&A more connected and collaborative with every corner of the business, we’ve put extra effort into making workforce planning easier and more intuitive in this release.

You’ll notice an enhanced, more streamlined user experience for Planful Workforce Planning right away. Our Spring20 release gave you a preview of the new look. Summer20 puts it front and center for every Planful customer. The redesigned experience lets you customize Workforce Planning for what matters most to your business, with fewer clicks and a faster path to building more insightful plans and forecasts.

Additional improvements include:

• The ability to customize your employee roster with new compensation items or attributes
• Role-based controls to hide confidential compensation information so personal data is only visible to those who need it
• The ability to manage employee rosters across multiple departments simultaneously
• Advanced search functionality to find and update information for individuals or groups of employees faster than ever

More dynamic capabilities for a continuous planning culture

Dynamic Collaboration has been one of our most popular new capabilities since we launched it in Spring20. It gives users the power to work smarter and more efficiently within FP&A and across the business. Summer20 builds on that collaborative foundation with a range of enhancements.

New in Summer20 for Dynamic Collaboration:

• Enhanced filtering, sorting, editing, and highlighting capabilities that are user-specific, so Planful remembers your preferred choices
• Email notifications to help you track and manage comments as you work, keeping everyone focused and aligned on key tasks and deliverables
• The ability to include comments and background narratives so teams see the story behind the numbers, in context, for better decision-making

Dynamic Planning also gets a significant performance boost in Summer20. Enhanced APIs and behind-the-scenes improvements make the entire experience faster and more intuitive. Customers are seeing data move between financial and operational models up to five times faster than before. A new and improved folder structure also makes it easier to organize, locate, and work with all your Dynamic Planning maps.

Paving the way for future Planful advancements

Under the hood, Summer20 includes an important upgrade to our underlying database technology. This improves platform performance and speed across the board, and lays the groundwork for new artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, with some compelling use cases coming in future releases.

Summer20 also moves us closer to full support for international characters, paving the way for more countries and local language ledgers to be loaded and rendered in Planful. This is a significant benefit for our international customers and makes Planful an even more powerful platform for global FP&A teams.

While pushing to release Summer20, we also enabled some of our largest customers to go live on Dynamic Planning and more than doubled our benchmarked performance measurements. Those improvements benefit every customer on the platform. Our product development team deserves a lot of credit for these advances, and so do our customers. Your continued feedback and passion for Planful inspire us to make the product better every day and to think well beyond your current needs so we can put new capabilities in your hands before you even realize you need them.

Summer20 is available now

Every Planful customer received automatic access to Summer20 on August 21. There’s nothing you need to do.

We know times are tough for everyone right now. We hope Summer20 makes your job easier, faster, and a bit more rewarding. We’re continuing to pour our hearts and minds into Planful every day, and we’ll be back in a few months with the Fall20 release.

If you have feedback or a product suggestion, reach out to your Planful account manager. In the meantime, see the Planful platform in action and discover what Continuous Planning can do for your team.