Statista Chooses Planful To Transform Workforce Planning, Boost Business Engagement, and Slash Cycle Times

Statista works to empower people with fact-based decision-making that positively impacts society. Its extensive collection of statistics, reports, and insights covers over 80,000 topics, all delivered by its 1,400 professionals across 13 global locations. But, after years of managing financial planning via spreadsheets, it was time for a change. Once Statista found Planful, it replaced error-prone planning processes with a modern and collaborative financial performance management solution.

Statista was established in Germany in 2007 and quickly grew to become one of the internet’s most popular sources for data and business intelligence. More than 18 million people reference its statistics, reports, and insights monthly. But, as its business grew rapidly, its finance and accounting teams continued to rely on Microsoft Excel for its planning and budgeting needs.

“You can do a lot with Excel, but it has its problems,” said Petra Winkelmann, Team Lead, Controlling at Statista in Berlin. “The main issue is ensuring everyone knows where the data is and that it’s consistent. There’s also the absence of collaboration and workflow tools that make the day-to-day steering of the process very cumbersome. It just isn’t a good long-term solution.”

Petra recalled facing challenges when managing workforce planning information in spreadsheets without adequate security and access controls. Spreadsheets also lacked crucial capabilities for versioning, reporting, and comparing different plans to evaluate variances.

Statista evaluated three potential financial performance management solutions. Based on positive recommendations from colleagues who had previously worked with Planful, it quickly became clear that it was the perfect solution.

“Once we started with Planful, it was a smooth process,” said Petra. “We set up our workforce planning budget entities and hierarchy structure first. Then, we got all of our planners trained on Planful. I’d say our first budgeting process in Planful was very good.”

With Planful, Petra added, workforce planning data is now unified in one system, and comparisons are much easier. That helps streamline the company’s five annual re-forecasting and budgeting processes. Additionally, since Statista is publicly traded, it relies on Planful for its quarterly reports.

Statista also chose Planful for its comprehensive financial performance management platform, enabling the company to eventually move additional processes out of spreadsheets, such as OPEX, working capital planning, and sales planning.

Moving financial processes out of spreadsheets and onto a dedicated financial performance management solution gave Statista a centralized, unified source for its global workforce planning efforts. It helped Statista save time and enabled the company to improve compliance, data privacy, and access controls.
“Planful lets us create and compare workforce scenarios in a single system and build reports with greater efficiency,” Petra explained. “Generating reports now takes minutes instead of hours; that’s a significant time saving.”

Petra added: “Another major advantage with Planful is that everyone involved in the planning process now can access the data they need. They know exactly where to find it, which wasn’t the case before. Since our organization constantly changes, Planful’s simple user and role management also makes it easy for us to adjust permissions and manage access.”

Using Planful’s workforce planning templates has also streamlined Statista’s planning process. Petra pointed to their newfound ability to “steer the process and track its progress” as teams make changes and solidify plans, and that Planful reduces planning cycles with helpful features like carrying edits across the entire plan.

Statista also relies on Planful’s capabilities for managing multiple currencies and converting them to euros for final reporting and analysis. Beyond saving time and streamlining planning processes, Petra sees the intangible benefits Planful brings to Statista’s global operations through greater participation and process ownership.

“Using Planful helps our departments feel more committed to the budget because they’re involved in the process,” Petra said. “They can challenge and adjust their inputs directly, which improves engagement and mindset. It’s no longer just the controlling team dictating the budget.”