Planful's New Product Innovations Enable Finance Automation, Collaboration, and Innovation

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May 15, 2024, 14:00 ET

New Technology, Ideas, and Strategies Shared at Perform24 Support Finance, Accounting, Marketing, and HR Leaders Go Beyond to Drive Peak Financial Performance

SAN FRANCISCO, May 15, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Planful Inc ., the pioneer of financial performance management cloud software, announced today, as part of the Perform24 theme to "Go Beyond," an array of product advancements tied to three key pillars: Automate, Collaborate, and Innovate. The company unveiled the future of Planful AI, new Planful for Workforce and Planful for Marketing capabilities, connectors with Snowflake and Microsoft Power BI, and more. The company also debuted the Solution Hub, an all-new searchable collection of pre-built solutions, open for anyone to explore, and for customers to configure. With these advancements, Planful is bringing increased value to large and fast-growing organizations and supporting their business leaders in driving peak financial performance.

"Achieving successful financial performance management requires a highly-collaborative effort and organizations who treat it as a team sport will thrive and outperform their competitors," said Steve Welsh, Chief Product Officer, Planful. "Planful's purpose-built product delivery and vision is an intentional result of working with our customers to make that team effort easier, faster, and more connected by unlocking the data teams need to make confident decisions."

Innovate: The Future of Planful AI

The company announced the extended vision for Planful AI and significant investments that will bring its first generative AI experience to customers later this year. Finance and business leaders will have access to a unified suite of Planful AI solutions that include:

Operational automation that anticipates tasks and processes, recommends next steps, and gathers insights into how a process is running and if a reminder is needed to complete data inputs for a forecast
Analytics and decision support for both simple and complex, time-consuming scenario analysis that anticipates tasks to uncover variances and the meaning behind the numbers, while also suggesting next steps to further the analysis when business leaders are evaluating key business decisions

These new generative AI capabilities will complement the company's existing, industry-leading Planful Predict AI/ML suite of solutions, which have been foundational in automating forecasting, error detection, and manual processes for businesses worldwide.

Collaborate: New Capabilities for Planning as a Team Sport

At Perform24 the company introduced new solution advancements, including Planful for Workforce capabilities and Planful for Marketing features, that improve business outcomes by facilitating collaboration and unlocking access to data across teams.

The new Planful for Workforce capabilities announced at Perform will enable Finance and People leaders to collaborate directly in the platform to generate actionable insights. These capabilities include advanced analytics, actuals data loading at the most granular level, multi-currency capabilities for employee and compensation item planning, and more. With almost 90% of Planful customers using Planful for Workforce, users will be able to leverage their existing data to rapidly conduct complex scenario analysis in managing their most valuable asset–people.

The latest Planful for Marketing advancements include a new integration with Coupa; further reporting enhancements, including custom fields and attributes; and new forecasting capabilities.

Automate: Frictionless Access to Data

Planful introduced several new connectors that will further support customers with their overall data strategy. A new connector with Snowflake, a data-cloud company, enables governed access to limitless volumes of financial performance and other business data. This integration will meet the growing need of enterprises to share data, build AI/ML applications, and power business growth using a modern data infrastructure. It will also reduce friction, speed data access, and enable highly-complex financial modeling and calculations. The new connector with Microsoft Power BI, an interactive data visualization software product, accommodates the consumption of Planful data to augment with other data sources natively in Power BI.

Protective Industrial Products, a global leader in personal protective equipment that offers an extensive range of over 20,000 products, leverages the Planful platform for agile and efficient planning as it continues to expand its market reach and diversify its offerings through many strategic acquisitions. "Planful's automation capabilities have greatly streamlined our acquisition processes," said Mark Smith, Director, Corporate FP&A at Protective Industrial Products, and a speaker at Planful Perform24. "Planful has become a must-have tool for our team and we integrate it into each of our newly acquired entities. Its automation capabilities not only help to simplify acquisition processes, but also enhance our consolidation and workforce planning in a very dynamic M&A environment."

New Early Adopter Program

Customers can now join an early adopter program with Planful to gain access to a range of unreleased product advancements and find opportunities to co-innovate and trial Planful AI. With this new program, Planful continues to prioritize product development that is closely attuned to practical customer needs and top feedback.

Watch Perform24 live today or on demand later this week to hear what Planful customers and industry thought leaders are saying about driving peak financial performance.

About Planful

Planful is the pioneer of financial performance management cloud software. The Planful platform, which helps businesses drive peak financial performance, 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 1,400 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 planful.com.

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