Integrate Cuts Month-End Close from Days to an Hour with Planful

Since going live with Planful, Integrate has:

• Cut its month-end FP&A close from days to an hour, including baseline analysis.
• Put Planful AI to work on day-to-day analysis. Analyst Assistant allows the CFO to self-serve budget and variance questions in plain English, while FP&A catches variances that a manual review might miss.
• Made last-minute reporting updates flow through every slide and report in minutes, with the numbers tying end to end.
• Eliminated version-control issues by planning directly in one system, with NetSuite and Salesforce integrated.
• Moved department reporting to a monthly cadence, up from once every two to three months.
• Built customized top-line ARR waterfalls in Dynamic Planning.
• Replaced a manually maintained Excel and Power Query model, removing the single-point-of-failure risk that came with it.
• Freed FP&A capacity to take on more requests without adding headcount.

Integrate’s finance team was running a rapidly scaling marketing technology business on spreadsheets that had reached their limit.

“Life before Planful involved a lot of spreadsheets, large 50 megabyte Excel files, clunky processes,” says Adam Hoffer, Senior FP&A Manager at Integrate. “If things change, it requires days of work, and things are slow and inaccurate.”

The model was held together with Power Query and intricate formulas that took constant upkeep, and the knowledge to keep it running lived with one person. “If something broke, it broke bad,” Adam says. “I became a single point of failure, which is not sustainable for the long term.”

Scott Mogel, Chief Financial Officer at Integrate, saw the same problem from the top. “Our old Excel model was fine when we first built it. But as organizations grow, you increase complexity, and the model just evolves. It becomes kind of held together with spit and bubble gum,” he says.

Every budget cycle multiplied the strain. Plans moved by email, versions drifted out of sync, and the team spent its time pulling and reshaping data from NetSuite and Salesforce by hand before any real analysis could start. “We were very much buried in spreadsheets,” says Scott. “We were constantly sending spreadsheets back and forth to all of our budget owners, and there were version-control issues.”

With the business scaling and its private-equity sponsor eyeing acquisitions, finance needed a foundation that could grow with it.

Adam and Scott are both repeat Planful customers. Adam had implemented Planful at a previous company and recommended it for Integrate. Scott had used both Planful and Adaptive in previous roles. When Integrate weighed the two, Planful was the obvious choice.

The deciding factor boiled down to flexibility. “A big differentiator for Planful is the UI, which is significantly better than just about any other tool on the market, and having the option to work in both structured and dynamic was a big selling point,” Adam says. “We could basically do anything we wanted in an automated fashion.”

Scott pointed to the same strength from the CFO seat. “What I really liked about Planful is the flexibility to handle the complexity in the business,” he says. “What makes Planful special is dynamic planning. You can handle any level of complexity and customization that you want.”

He sums it up simply: “I just think it’s light years above where other platforms are.”

• Structured and dynamic planning in one platform. Integrate uses Dynamic Planning to model the parts of the business that do not fit a standard template, including top-line ARR waterfalls. “We have to build our ARR waterfalls. You look at your current annual recurring revenue run rate, then layer on new business and expansion, and what you expect to lose from churn and downsell,” Scott says. “We’re able to model all of that out in Dynamic Planning.”
• Workforce Planning for a global, complex team. Planful for Workforce handles compensation nuances and currencies for a team spread across the U.S., India, and Hungary, and makes one-off changes simple. “If you wanted everybody at a four percent raise, and this person needs to be three and this team needs to be five, in the old model you had to build all these complicated formulas,” Adam says. “In Planful, I fill out one cell, I press save, I process, and I’m done.”
• Automated reporting from one source of truth. Integrate automates its monthly operating reviews and private-equity sponsor packages through Excel reporting in Spotlight for Microsoft 365, taking work that used to take hours down to minutes. Those reports link directly to the team’s month-end PowerPoint decks, so a single refresh updates every slide.
• Native integration with NetSuite and Salesforce. Planful connects directly to the systems where the data lives, so finance is no longer bringing it in-house by hand. “We’re able to integrate directly with our key systems, directly with Salesforce, directly with NetSuite,” Scott says. “We can really focus on what matters, the analysis and the budgeting.”
• Shared access across the business. Stakeholders across R&D, sales, marketing, and G&A now work from one set of numbers in Planful. When a request comes in, Adam points people to live reports instead of building a one-off deliverable from scratch. “The biggest difference is I can say yes to more things now,” Adam says. “I can spin something up very quickly, send a link, and say the reports are ready.”
• Plain-language answers with Planful AI. Even early in its rollout, Planful AI is changing how the team works. Scott uses it to self-serve the questions he used to route through Adam. “I can now go directly to Analyst Assistant and ask those questions myself. Is this in the budget? Can you explain this variance? What were our bookings last month? I can self-serve by asking in plain English,” he says.

For Adam, Planful AI runs a check on his own work. He uses Analyst Assistant on large datasets to surface what a manual pass can miss. “I can tell it to go look for a 10% variance on a vendor, actual versus budget. I may have missed one. It’ll always catch it,” he says. “It gives you the security of knowing my commentary is right, and my forecast is right.” On a small team, that extra set of eyes is crucial.

Adam also uses Planful AI Help to answer questions in-platform. “Planful AI Help has become a must in our building and maintenance practices. It provides an easy way to tap into Planful’s extensive documentation and allows us to be Planful experts, even on subjects we haven’t worked on before.” Adam and his team can ask Help a plain-English question, and they’ll get back a list of modules and the training articles in response. It saves the team time, ensures they follow best practices, and cuts the cost of bringing in outside consultants.

In just one month, the month-end close has dropped from days to about an hour, including baseline analysis.

The harder test is incorporating any last-minute changes, and as CFO, Scott knows he’s usually the source. By his own admission, he’s “probably the biggest offender on giving Adam last-minute information.” With Planful, those updates now reach every slide in minutes with the data aligned.

With their old spreadsheet model, the team always worried that something would break or a department would get left out when the numbers rolled up. Planful replaced that with one reconciled source. “Your numbers always tie across all your different slides and reports,” Scott says.

That data integrity has changed the pace of decision-making. “You’re not sending stale data, you’re sending data as it happens, so we’re all reacting to the same numbers,” Scott says. “We can make smarter, better-informed decisions much faster.” The hours Finance gets back are going directly into the business. Now, the team has time to sit with department heads and walk them through the plan ahead of board meetings.

That capacity matters most for what is coming. Integrate’s private-equity sponsor is very acquisitive, and Scott sees Planful as the platform built to handle the consolidation work that comes with it. “Knowing we’ll have Planful to roll up the data from all those different entities, and look at performance by business unit and at a consolidated level, is how I see Planful supporting the future of the business,” Scott says.