Malwarebytes Gets “A Swiss Army Knife for Finance” With Planful

Malwarebytes struggled with its financial planning management (FPM) tool due to its inability to adapt to its rapidly changing business. Seeking a more flexible and user-friendly solution, they switched to Planful, which allowed Finance to maintain the platform without external help. As a result, Malwarebytes now efficiently manages forecasting, budgeting, and reporting within a single, finance-owned platform.

Malwarebytes is a fast-growing company. But, its business of providing cyber protection to global customers as diverse as “grandparents to geeks” also forces it to be highly nimble. Obviously, its financial systems need to keep pace.

“The business has changed a lot over the years,” recalled Cory Lauchmen, Senior Manager, Financial Reporting at Malwarebytes. “We were using Anaplan, and it was very clunky. We had put a lot of Band-Aids on that software, making it very difficult and slow to use.”

An ill-suited Systems Integrator (SI) choice forced the company to abandon its first vendor rollout. A new SI came on board but, building on the initial rollout, chose to apply fixes that created even more issues. The result was “Band-Aids on top of Band-Aids,” which resulted in financial statements that didn’t tie, balance sheets and cash flows with different ending cash balances, and other frustrations that led its finance team to do most of its reporting in spreadsheets.

In early 2024, Malwarebytes considered re-implementing the previous solution from scratch. However, it would still need to contend with high costs based on data storage size, which forced Malwarebytes to remove scenarios before running new ones and consider reducing the amount of data ingested into the system. Ultimately, the company chose to look for a new platform.

Malwarebytes started to evaluate platform options with an eye on flexibility and ease of use, specifically a low-code or no-code approach that allowed Finance to make changes and integrations without external assistance. That ease-of-use requirement also extended to the user interface, which led Malwarebytes to Planful.

“I know from working with prior systems that it can be difficult if you don’t know the language it speaks,” Cory said. “Planful lets us use Excel syntax. Also, anybody can maintain it rather than having to constantly reach out, which ends up increasing contracting costs.”

After migrating from their previous FPM solution, Malwarebytes now relies on Planful for its annual budgeting cycles, to run rolling forecasts and monthly OpEx updates, and to deliver internal and external financial reports. Since Planful uses Excel syntax, moving the team’s Excel-based models onto the Planful platform has been a fast and easy transition. And, as Malwarebytes prepares for its upcoming annual planning cycle, its finance team is looking forward to having a single resource for and increased confidence in its financial data.

“Planful is a Swiss army knife for finance; it’s the tool we’re always using,” added Cory. “Being on a finance-owned solution is huge. We don’t have to rely on other people who might have other priorities that could cause delays in reporting. When it’s finance-owned, we can troubleshoot anything.”

Planful is now an essential, all-in-one tool for Malwarebytes. Having an intuitive, finance-owned solution ensures Finance can keep pace and avoid delays caused by reliance on IT or external consultants, no matter how fast or wide its business grows.