Safety National Saves 660+ Hours Annually and Empowers Budget Owners with Planful

Safety National is a specialty insurance and reinsurance provider with more than 80 years of experience serving customers across the United States. Headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, Safety National is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tokyo-based Tokio Marine Holdings, Inc., a top-10 global insurer with a presence in over 40 countries.

With FP&A processes running on spreadsheets, Safety National’s finance team was spending too much time on manual work and struggling to scale. On the recommendation of a sister company’s finance team, they chose Planful to elevate financial planning and reporting to give teams back time to focus on higher-impact work.

As a specialty insurer, Safety National works with highly complex financial calculations, sometimes using spreadsheets with thousands of rows. This was all managed using Excel, leading to time-consuming processes, limited visibility, and a heavy reliance on manual updates.

“Our process was manual, complex, and far from scalable,” said Ruby Tan, Safety National’s Planning and Reserving Manager. “We sent numerous emails back and forth to our department heads. We had to pull numbers from different systems. We relied heavily on Excel, with some spreadsheets having thousands of calculations. It was all so time-consuming.”

Budget templates had to be created and tracked by hand. Departments had no real-time visibility into their numbers. Finance spent countless hours cleaning up spreadsheets just to keep reporting on track.

Safety National began the search for a modern financial performance management solution — one that would automate reporting, reduce manual effort, and empower Finance to operate independently from IT support. While OneStream was initially considered, Ruby sought the advice of a related entity already using Planful.

Planful came highly recommended by Tokio Marine HCC, a sister company. As both are within the Tokio Marine Group, Safety National took a closer look. Beyond its impressive functionality, Ruby and her team valued Planful’s ability to put control directly in the hands of Finance.

“As we looked into different solutions, we didn’t want to rely on our IT team for support,” explained Ruby. “Planful lets us be our own IT heroes. We don’t need to submit IT tickets for every change. Our finance team can do everything we need to do.”

Safety National began using Planful’s Dynamic Planning solution from day one, leveraging it to support the company’s complex financial processes. Despite the intricacy of insurance calculations, Ruby found the platform flexible and easy to adapt.

“Dynamic Planning is just so powerful,” said Ruby. “ I’ve used ERP systems in the past, but Planful is very flexible, especially for the complexities of our industry.”

To streamline reporting, the team uses Planful Spotlight for Microsoft 365, which connects live data with Planful in familiar tools like Excel and PowerPoint.

“Spotlight gives you real-time updates to create an asset base, monthly departmental packages, and management reports in any format you need,” said Ruby. “No matter if you’re working in Planful Structured Planning or Dynamic Planning, you can have it all in Spotlight, too.”

Safety National also implemented Planful Report Collections, which lets users generate and distribute Excel or PDF files via email or Planful, and Planful Cloud Scheduler, which automatically runs tasks at a scheduled time.

“Today, we’re using Report Collections to prepare monthly packages for our department heads,” said Ruby. “Everything is set up in Planful, and with Cloud Scheduler, we can schedule the system to send reports automatically — even if someone’s on vacation.”

With Planful, Safety National has dramatically reduced manual effort and freed up time across Finance and the business.

“The time savings is the best part of Planful,” Ruby said. “We’ve saved about 660 hours annually after implementing Planful, and that number continues to grow as we maximize how we use Planful.”

Ruby credits Planful Spotlight with driving a significant portion of that time savings, as it eliminated the manual cut-and-paste report updates previously required by the company’s spreadsheet-driven processes.

“With Spotlight, it’s just a click — just a second — and everything refreshes automatically,” Ruby said.

Each month, the team now delivers 35 to 40 report packages across the company, on time and with centralized data that’s always accurate, thanks to support from Report Collections and Cloud Scheduler.

Planful also gave more than 30 department stakeholders and business owners direct access to the platform. Instead of relying on Finance to send out templates or respond to email requests, department leaders now track budgets, review actuals, and analyze spend themselves.

“Before Planful, communication was a challenge,” Ruby said. “Now, teams can track their budgets, managers can drill down into spend across departments, and everyone can make decisions so much faster.”

And for Finance, Planful’s impact goes beyond saving some time.

“What we really like is that Planful empowers us to achieve more without working overtime or sacrificing time with our families. Planful is definitely welcomed with open arms at Safety National.”