Orlando Regional Realtor Association Cuts Budgeting Cycles By 90% With Planful

The Orlando Regional REALTOR® Association (ORRA) is one of the largest local trade associations in the state of Florida with more than 20,000 REALTORS and affiliate members. Its membership is composed of residential and commercial REALTORS, brokers, and others who are engaged in all aspects of the real estate industry. But after having had enough of manual budgeting processes and cumbersome workforce planning spreadsheets, ORRA made the switch to Planful and saved hundreds of hours each cycle.

ORRA traces its roots back to 1921, with strong growth and mergers with other similar organizations leading to its current membership of more than 20,000 REALTORS and affiliate members in Orange, Seminole, and surrounding Orlando-area counties in Florida. Much of that growth was built on manual finance processes that, one hundred years after its founding, created obstacles to future growth. 

“Before Planful, my very first budgeting cycle was a struggle,” recalled Amanda Martin, VP Finance and Technology at ORRA. “We had a huge Excel spreadsheet that took about 5 minutes to open because it was so large.”

Amanda, recognizing the significant amount of time consumed by these legacy financial performance management processes, decided to make a switch to Planful.

ORRA took its monster spreadsheet, created breakdowns by departments, committees, and other categories, and migrated it into Planful. This new solution gave Amanda a single source of planning truth that was also fast and easy to use. Planful also enabled a newfound effortless collaboration with budget owners across the organization while maintaining privacy and security.

“It’s very difficult to [plan and budget] when you don’t know what you don’t know,” Amanda said. “Planful lets us show specific staff members just their portion of the budget so they don’t have to scroll through tons of different lines of data. If they’re only responsible for 4 lines, they only have to see those 4 lines. That was absolutely crucial for us.”

The streamlined effort to make financial performance management a team sport using Planful has saved ORRA hundreds of hours in its planning and budgeting cycles.

“We’re entering our new budget season and I have so much faith that it’s going to be two budget meetings and maybe 40 to 80 hours of work versus probably 400 that I spent my first year,” added Amanda.

ORRA has also integrated Planful with its existing Sage Intacct accounting system to ensure accuracy, give its budget managers an intuitive budgeting and planning experience, and further reduce its reliance on slow, error-prone manual processes.

“Planful, working alongside our Sage Intacct, makes everything a lot more seamless because we have one place where we can see all of our information,” Amanda continued. “We don’t have to put information into Excel, put it into [Sage Intacct], and go back and forth. Planful pulls all of our numbers so we can see, side by side, here’s what’s budgeted, here’s our actuals to date.”

Developed for non-finance users, Planful’s Budget Manager Experience creates a collaborative, one-stop-shop experience for budget managers to run their business and accelerate planning cycles. Budget managers can view actuals, spot trends, and leverage a connected, AI-driven planning process through a highly-intuitive and focused interface. Finance users can also guide budget managers with templates to automate data aggregation and minimize manual data requests and submissions without pushing non-finance users into a complex finance, accounting, or ERP tool.

“I don’t have to give staff members access to an accounting system,” added Amanda. “I get leary even if it’s read-only. They’re just in Planful, so I don’t have to worry about us not catching something in time and causing a budgetary issue. It’s been absolutely amazing!”

For most organizations, the workforce is a significant budget item, and it’s no different at ORRA. Considering staff size along with the variabilities of salaries, budgets, bonuses, and more, it’s another critical component of the budgeting and planning process that quickly outgrows what spreadsheets can handle. So ORRA also uses Workforce Planning to streamline how it plans and budgets headcount.

“[Planful] takes that guesswork out of it and automatically does the math so we don’t have to worry, ‘Is this number correct?’’” said Amanda. “It has saved us a ton of time and a ton of energy. My HR person is a super-user of Planful because of workforce planning.”

With such success across planning and budgeting processes, driven by Planful’s intuitive interface and easy integrations, ORRA is just getting started.

“We’re just going to continue to compound the savings we’ve already gotten out of Planful,” Amanda concluded.