LT Apparel: 3x Growth, 5-Day Close, and 10 Years of Partnership with Planful

After a decade of successfully using Planful, LT Apparel has:

• Reduced its monthly close to five business days, consistently, down from 10 to 15 days
• Built a monthly rolling forecast ready in one to two business days after close
• Cut ad hoc reporting time by 98%, from hours to minutes
• Scaled finance operations to support 3x growth in business volume
• Expanded finance capabilities with consolidations, Power BI dashboards, and AI capabilities

Before Planful, LT Apparel’s finance team was running into a problem many growing companies recognize: everything took too long.

Reporting and planning depended on ERP downloads and heavy Excel manipulation. Forecasts could take months to complete. Even basic reporting requests from leadership often took hours.

“Once we got to the point where it was taking us several months to complete a single forecast and it took us hours to do any general, simple reporting, it was time,” said Lee Johnston, Senior Vice President of Finance.

The impact went beyond inefficiency. Delays limited Finance’s ability to support timely decision-making. Frustration was high across finance, the leadership team, and the board. Much of finance’s time was consumed by pulling data, manipulating spreadsheets, and journal entries, with little time left for analysis or strategic partnership.

LT Apparel needed a planning and reporting foundation that could scale with the business and keep pace with rising expectations for speed, accuracy, and decision support.

When Lee evaluated planning solutions over a decade ago, one thing set Planful apart: a true partnership mindset.

Planful easily integrated into Lee’s team, operating as a partner rather than a bolted-on vendor. From the start, Lee believed Planful would do what it took to make the company successful.

“Planful has absolutely turned out to be that partner,” Lee said. “There’s never been a doubt that their number one priority is LT Apparel’s success.”

Equally important, Planful fits how the team wanted to work, bringing structure, scale, and speed without forcing finance to abandon Excel.

• Excel-first forecasting and reporting: Planful’s Spotlight for Microsoft 365 and Dynamic Planning allows the team to build, update, and refresh forecasts directly in Excel with governed Planful data. The team brings in 24 months of actuals, projects forward using calculations and drivers, and updates forecasts by simply refreshing reports.
• Rolling forecasts: Finance delivers a monthly rolling forecast within one to two business days after close, replacing a process that previously took several months to complete.
• Accelerated monthly close: Planful supports a consistent five-business-day monthly close, down from 10 to 15 business days.
• Real-time collaboration: Finance reviews projections live with business unit leaders, incorporates updates in real time, and delivers finalized full P&Ls within an hour.
• Automated daily data refresh: Financial data refreshes overnight, so reports are ready each morning, giving leadership immediate, reliable visibility to answer questions without delay
• Consolidations for acquisitions: Planful’s consolidation solution integrates disparate systems quickly, aggregating results from acquired entities without manual rework.
• Dashboards through Power BI: Planful’s Power BI connector seamlessly integrates LT Apparel’s data, both financial and operational, enabling broader visibility and self-service reporting.
• Expanding footprint: LT Apparel is exploring Planful AI for budget pre-seeding and predictive planning.

Over the last decade, LT Apparel has transformed its finance operations with Planful, delivering faster closes, more agile forecasting, and a cultural shift toward data-driven decision-making across the organization.

Faster close, forecasting, and reporting

• 5-day monthly close, reduced from 10 to 15 business days
• 1-2 day rolling forecast, reduced from several months and now completed monthly instead of once or twice a year
• Minutes instead of hours for ad hoc reporting, with requests that once took five hours now completed in minutes

Strategic impact across the organization

With reporting and data prep automated, the finance team shifted from manual processes to a true strategic partnership. “We’ve pivoted to more analysis, more reconciliation, and more advice from finance,” Lee said. “More of a partnership.”

Building a culture rooted in collaboration

Planful changed how the Finance team works together, strengthening collaboration and shared ownership. “It’s really brought us closer together as a finance team because we’re all interested in it. We like to use it. We like to share best practices,” Lee said. “It’s fun for finance folks like me.”

The reduction in frustration has been dramatic, not only for finance but for the leadership team, the CEO, and the board.

LT Apparel’s business volume has grown approximately 3x over the past decade, and Planful has kept pace. “The calculation time has continued to decrease while our data and models continue to increase,” Lee said.

“I would do ten more years with Planful. It really has become the lifeblood and driven a lot of the culture at LT Apparel.”