McLarens Gains Trust, Efficiency, and Peace of Mind With Planful

McLarens is a leading global insurance professional services provider with more than 230 offices across 45 countries. The firm is focused on complex commercial claims, which means speed, accuracy, and visibility in financial reporting are mission-critical, especially when answering to a private equity backer and a global board.

To support that high bar, McLarens relies on Planful to enable confident decision-making, trusted reporting, and scalable processes as the business continues to grow.

When Daniel Rahm joined McLarens as VP of FP&A, the company was already using Planful, but only scratching the surface of what it could do. As McLarens continued to grow globally, the pressure on FP&A increased. Regional finance teams were generating more data, stakeholders were asking deeper questions, and the need for trust and speed in reporting became essential.

“We had this great tool, but we were probably only using 10 to 20% of what it could do,” Daniel said.

At the time, the team at McLarens still leaned heavily on spreadsheets to analyze actuals versus plan, which made it difficult to drill into results or explain variance drivers.

“We have many different stakeholders with varied questions, which we want to answer as quickly as possible. We could give them the ten-thousand-foot view, but then couldn’t answer their follow-up questions because there was nothing to drill down into — we just had a spreadsheet full of numbers,” Daniel explained.

Understanding variances, from hiring trends to productivity to OpEx, was critical to supporting McLarens’ board and private equity ownership. But too much time was spent manually gathering data across global teams and currencies.

“Spreadsheets forced us to be like Neanderthals, where we hunted, gathered, and collected information 80% of the time and only spent 20% of the time analyzing the data. We needed to change that around.”

To keep pace with the company’s growth and better support strategic decision-making, FP&A needed to evolve by fully embracing Planful and its powerful capabilities.

To meet the demands of its growing, increasingly complex business, McLarens set out to expand how it used Planful, turning a lightly adopted system into a foundation for trusted, scalable finance. Rather than layering on new tools, the team focused on deepening its use of Planful across reporting, budgeting, and variance analysis.

“We’re using Planful for monthly reporting, actuals versus plan, budgeting, and more,” said Daniel.

Planful Spotlight for Microsoft 365 gave McLarens the flexibility of Excel with the structure and drill-down capabilities of an enterprise platform. Regional finance teams could work in a familiar environment while accessing real-time, consistent data. At the same time, leadership gained a clearer view of performance drivers across business units, regions, and currencies.

“With Spotlight, we source data from Planful and let the regions work on their variances in Excel so they can dig into the variance drivers. We don’t have to massage the data; it’s just there, and people trust the numbers,” said Daniel.

To support its evolving ERP environment, which includes some entities on SAP and others on legacy systems, McLarens collaborated with Planful partner Bakerfield Solutions. Together, they streamlined data acquisition and integration, ensuring that critical financial data flowed cleanly and securely into Planful for analysis.

This shift made it far easier for FP&A to deliver on the company’s growing information needs, especially when board members or private equity stakeholders asked for deep, segmented views of performance.

“In the past, our answers were very vague,” recalled Daniel. “It took an enormous amount of time and effort, and every question prompted more questions to slice the data from a different angle. But then, we’d need to prove that the initial answer was still valid.”

“Now, with Planful, it doesn’t matter if we look at the data from the bottom up, top down, or another angle. Any way we look at the data in Planful, we get the same outcome.”

With Planful, McLarens has transformed how its finance team supports the business. FP&A and global budget owners benefit from an integrated, easy-to-use platform that offers the freedom to work in spreadsheets while providing access to deeper data and insights with a single click.

“Planful is a really slick tool that gives us a lot of intuitive reporting capabilities,” said Daniel. “The currency conversion is quite good. It’s very easy to get your hands around Planful, and our users see that we’ve come a long way.”

Today, Planful powers measurable improvements across McLarens’ global finance operations:

• Accuracy: “Planful is just more integrated, more structured, and we know the data is reliable. If we drill down, we get to the details, and the sum of the details adds up to what we’re seeing at the aggregate level.”
• Efficiency: “I want humans to do as little as possible. We have a lot of reports in Spotlight that we can run with the push of a button. That’s where we get efficiency gains from Planful.”
• Scalability: “Planful is not just a tool for small or mid-market size companies; it’s for companies much larger than McLarens, too. Planful’s scalability is important when I look at how we’re planning to evolve over the next three to five years. Knowing that we have a tool in place to support us as we grow just makes sense.”
• Trust: “What’s really changed since using Planful is the perception that our board and PE firm have. They trust that when we get a question and deliver data out of Planful, they can bank on it.”

As the team looks ahead, Daniel sees Planful playing an even greater role — especially in workforce planning. With operations in more than 30 jurisdictions and highly varied benefits structures, the opportunity to streamline workforce planning globally is significant.

“One of the big items on our wish list is to use Planful for Workforce. I’m very excited to learn more about Workforce Pro because it has two exciting benefits: limiting the time required to gather, collect, and massage the data, and enabling us to centrally manage benefits logic across all our major markets. We don’t want regional teams relying on spreadsheets for that analysis.”

Daniel repeated terms like trust, confidence, and comfort when explaining how Planful has impacted McLarens’ business over the past decade. It’s these more qualitative outcomes that help Daniel, his team, and stakeholders across the business move forward and make decisions decisively as McLarens continues to capture growth opportunities.

When asked to sum up how Planful has impacted his role specifically, Daniel pointed to the added peace of mind it delivers.

“I’m paid to be skeptical. I’m always looking for the mistake, for what’s wrong. With Planful, it seems to get harder and harder to find what’s wrong. It just always adds up.

“Using and trusting Planful gives me peace of mind. Which, for me, is very significant.”