Planful Wraps Up Successful Virtual Tour, Doubling Attendance as Interest in Continuous Planning Grows

Planful Inc. (formerly Host Analytics), a leading financial planning and analysis (FP&A) cloud platform provider, wrapped up its Virtual Tour today, capping a successful three-day program that brought FP&A professionals together, doubling attendance over last year’s in-person conference. The participation in the company’s virtual event reflects heightened interest in Planful’s Continuous Planning vision, as businesses look for ways to upgrade financial planning and decision-making capabilities in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It was excellent to hear customers, industry experts, and the Planful team share best practices and talk through solutions for these exceptionally challenging times,” said Grant Halloran, Planful CEO. “Business leaders are looking for paths to recovery in a transformed economic environment and FP&A teams are under pressure to provide more options and scenarios to the business.”

The Virtual Tour also gave Planful customers an opportunity to hear from the company’s executive team. Over the past year, the company welcomed 11 new senior executives with deep expertise in planning and high growth, including Rowan Tonkin who joined as Senior Vice President of Marketing last October. “The Tour brought together the Planful community that we’ve been proud to support through this period, where they’ve relied heavily on shared insights and ideas to navigate a very suddenly different business landscape,” said Tonkin. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Planful has curated and shared key information about how FP&A leaders can lead the recovery and has hosted over a thousand planning professionals in virtual forums, such as weekly live Zoom roundtables, a FP&A Slack community, and this week’s Planful Virtual Tour.

The success of the Virtual Tour was fueled in part by FP&A teams that want to ensure their companies are never again caught off guard by a black swan event like COVID-19. The economic challenges underscore the importance of planning for the unknown, a theme Halloran addressed in his keynote speech, calling a state of preparedness “Being Planful.”

In recent weeks, Planful has seen an overall 25% increase in the use of its platform by existing customers as businesses analyze factors affecting performance and explore options using Planful’s intuitive planning and decision-making platform. Given the growing demand for advanced planning solutions, Planful announced its Planful Now initiative at the Virtual Tour, a rapid deployment program to get new customers up and running on the platform within 30 days.

At the Virtual Tour, Senior Finance Manager at SmartyPants Cheryl Chow, whose fast-growing vitamin company worked with Planful partner Cogenics to deploy the Planful platform in less than a month, shared tips on how her company was able to realize fast time to value. She said, “the conventional wisdom in the industry is that even a fast cloud FP&A software deployment will take months, but with Planful, we were up and running with our Sales and Tradespend forecast templates in three weeks. Planful provided amazingly fast time to value, enabling the FP&A team to plan their quarterly reforecast following Q1 close, prepare for an upcoming board meeting, and create new forecasts for sales, advertising, and other areas without breaking our stride.”

On-demand videos from the Planful Virtual Tour are now available, including keynote sessions featuring R “Ray” Wang of Constellation Research; Tim Zue, CFO of The Boston Red Sox; Randy Brown, Director of FP&A at Nature’s Sunshine; and Shane Riddle, Director of Sales and Operations Controller at Planar Systems, along with presentations from Planful executives.

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.

press@planful.com

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