Planful Shares Continuous Planning Vision at Virtual Tour, Defining A Modern Framework for Financial Decision-Making

Planful Inc. (formerly Host Analytics),  a leading financial planning and analysis (FP&A) cloud platform provider, kicked off the Planful Virtual Tour today, featuring customers including the Boston Red Sox, Bose, and Nature’s Sunshine. In the keynote address, Planful CEO, Grant Halloran, unveiled new capabilities and functionality that bring the company’s Continuous Planning vision to life, enabling a modern framework for financial planning and decision-making that emphasizes speed, agility, and business-wide collaboration–all of which are increasingly important in the current climate.

“Continuous Planning is a vision and Planful is the partner that is helping companies achieve this cultural shift,“ said Halloran. “The new offerings and capabilities announced today make the Continuous Planning approach even more attainable for organizations, regardless of industry or company size. This vision optimizes business performance to provide a competitive advantage in any economic climate. We’re thrilled to bring these capabilities to our customers to help them succeed.”

Continuous Planning is the modern framework for financial planning and decision-making in business. It’s both a vision and a culture. It’s the recognition that business is continuous and therefore planning and decision-making should be too. Business advantage comes from being nimble, agile, and smart with your capital. Business leaders need to be able to respond to changing conditions at a moment’s notice in order to capitalize on new opportunities, protect against threats, and remain competitive and positioned for success.

“Planful helped accelerate our finance team and allowed us to capture financial results at a consolidated level for all business groups within the organization,” said presenter at the Planful Virtual Tour, Shane Riddle, Director of Sales and Operations Controller at Planar Systems, the digital wall displays and signage solution. “I can’t imagine running a business without Planful’s cloud-based platform, and I’m excited to see how these upcoming platform capabilities help businesses navigate this new-normal we’re all experiencing.”

During Halloran’s keynote, Planful announced exciting platform capabilities coming this year that allow customers to focus on compressing cycle times and facilitating faster collaboration with increased process and data connectivity, throughout every corner of the organization. These Continuous Planning benefits further empower customers to make better and faster decisions, elevate the financial IQ of their organizations, and empower the FP&A team to take the lead role as strategic advisors to their business counterparts. The new capabilities include

• Dynamic Collaboration provides the context needed to quickly and confidently make crucial business decisions. The first of its kind to be introduced to the industry, Dynamic Collaboration enables users to manage and analyze comments, tag other users, assign tasks platform-wide, and capture and communicate key insights to understand the story behind the numbers. Users can now avoid use of email and other messaging systems, effectively tracking all collaboration in the Planful platform.
• Dynamic Canvas offers a user experience that can be customized for different teams, roles, and use-cases across the company, easily bringing more non-finance colleagues into the collaborative planning process. Dynamic Canvas is a single experience for all data input, analysis, and decision-making fostering business-wide collaboration. Users can quickly see and analyze the financial impacts of decisions faster and more efficiently than ever before to understand how their plans impact other business teams and the overall financial picture company.
• Augmented Insights is a machine learning-driven capability that will provide predictive insights using historical data to foresee trends, prescriptive recommendations based on business context, and signal detection features to point out possible anomalies and prevent errors.

“Continuous planning has been the emerging best practice in recent years, but in the current climate it’s essential,” said Doug Henschen, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. “A modern planning platform that supports what-if scenario planning is a foundation for agile, data-driven decision making, and it can make the difference between surviving and thriving in challenging times.”

Continuous planning has been the emerging best practice in recent years, but in the current climate it’s essential,” said Doug Henschen, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. “A modern planning platform that supports what-if scenario planning is a foundation for agile, data-driven decision making, and it can make the difference between surviving and thriving in challenging times.” 

On May 20, the Planful Virtual Tour continues with the product keynote, where Planful executives will provide exciting details about platform enhancements and the company’s product roadmap, in addition to more exciting customer sessions. The Virtual Tour wraps up on May 21, with a deep dive featuring customers and subject matter experts who will discuss their Connected Planning experience as well as share knowledge and trends that will be valuable for FP&A professionals.

It’s not too late to join the Planful Virtual Tour. Attendees can still register for free.

Planful is the pioneer of financial performance management cloud software. The Planful platform is used around the globe to streamline business-wide planning, budgeting, consolidations, reporting, and analytics. Planful empowers finance, accounting, and business users to plan confidently, close faster, and report accurately. More than 1,300 customers, including 23andMe, Bose, Boston Red Sox, Five Guys and Zappos, rely on Planful to accelerate cycle times, increase productivity, and improve accuracy. Planful is a private company backed by Vector Capital, a leading global private equity firm. Learn more at www.planful.com.

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