Planful Announces Fall20 Product Release, Unveiling New Capabilities for Workforce Planning, Dynamic Planning, and Reporting

Redwood City, CA – Dec 1, 2020 – Planful Inc., (formerly Host Analytics), the pioneer of Continuous Planning with its cloud platform for financial planning and analysis (FP&A), today announced major platform enhancements with its Fall20 product release. The latest release builds on earlier updates to expand Continuous Planning capabilities, including enhancements to the company’s popular Workforce Planning solution and significant updates to operational planning and financial reporting capabilities.

“This is the busiest season for business and financial planning—the time when our customers demand the very best from their FP&A platform,” said Sanjay Vyas, Planful’s Chief Technology Officer. “We’re especially pleased to share exciting new enhancements with this Fall20 release that our customers can immediately leverage to further extend Continuous Planning into every corner of the business, compress the FY21 planning cycle, and make more confident and impactful financial decisions. This release delivers on our commitment to continuously innovate and expand opportunities for seamless collaboration across the business.”

Better Teamwork on Structured Planning with an xP&A Approach

In its Summer20 product release, Planful rolled out a redesigned Workforce Planning experience to enhance collaborative decision-making, facilitating teamwork between finance and HR teams. It enables the flow of real-time employee data across the platform, serving as an xP&A platform for projects that require planning and analysis in the finance department and beyond.

The new Fall20 release continues this momentum, providing a new visual experience where users can interact with employee-level expense information as they plan their workforce into the future. This enhancement makes it easier to update important information, modify compensation expense assumptions, and re-calculate employee expense forecasts with a single click.

Dynamic Planning Enhancements that Up-Level Collaboration

A Continuous Planning framework enables decision-makers in every corner of the business to work together to achieve organizational agility in today’s fast-changing business conditions. The Fall20 release up-levels collaborative possibilities with new enhancements, tools, and data models that are relevant for planners and decision-makers outside of the finance group, extending xP&A capabilities across the business.

Building on prior innovations, the Fall20 release simplifies the ability to build, visualize, and formulate data, filtering out irrelevant information and streamlining customization. API enhancements make it even simpler to integrate data from non-finance technology stacks, allowing users to conduct analysis and make confident data-informed decisions. Now, finance leaders are more empowered than ever with what-if scenarios and models to plan for any business outcome at a moment’s notice.

“Planful has absolutely given more power and insight to our team,” said David Marino, Controller & Associate Vice President at Temple University, a large research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania that recently implemented Planful’s consolidation solution.

Usability Improvements to Reporting

Frequent and iterative reporting is essential for planning and analysis, with users seeing rapid time-to-value by automating this aspect of the FP&A process. The Fall20 release enhances the reporting experience for users by enabling them to collaborate and communicate key insights with peers across the business more efficiently. These improvements provide for the fact that people consume information in many different ways, including dashboards, spreadsheets, emails, and PDFs. The release also includes resolution updates to mobile device viewing, allowing users to easily see insights wherever they are.

“Planful has helped my team spend less time actually building reports and more time doing the fun part of our job: analyzing data in the reports and being insightful advisors to the business,” said Strategic Finance Manager Kevin Zell at Carta, a leading capitalization table management and valuation software company, serving over 14,000 companies and over 800,000 investors, law firms, and employees.

Learn more about the features included in the Fall20 product release.

 

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