Planful Reviews in July 2026: User Ratings, Pros & Cons

"Like the attention to their customers"

What do you like best? I appreciate Host's responsiveness to their customers' needs. They listen to the feedback on the community and always consider the requests. What do you dislike? DLR - Wish manual loads would roll forward automatically. We are using automated loads now so in order for historical data from older DLRs to rollforward we need to manually enter zeroes for the next year. Planning & Budgeting workflow - Sometimes we need to add an employee or adjust a tax rate after one or ...

"Host Analytics survey"

What do you like best? using spotlight in Excel to populate reports What do you dislike? getting errors when trying to save workbooks that have a Spotlight data zone. What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized? we now have transaction level detail with modeling

"Powerful, flexible analytics; requires more intuition"

What do you like best about Planful? Host Analytics offers various methods for generating, interacting with, and delivering reporting and analytics for Budgeting, Forecasting, and Modeling. The ability to customize the Excel-based Spotlight reports is fantastic - the time saved helps us do what we're best at: telling the story and advising on strategy. As well, it integrates seamlessly with powerpoint for BOD presentations and dashboarding. I also like the security features and ...

"Good update"

What do you like best about Planful? the gathering of people that have a lot of the same questions and answers. the learning we can achieve from each other is great What do you dislike about Planful? would like to see another day of targeted training for people that are novices or that have people on their team that are novices Recommendations to others considering Planful: Be sure you have didicated resources to handle host it is too big to handle as a portion of someones job What problems ...

"Getting Better"

What do you like best about Planful? I like the enhanced drill-through function. It enables our budget owners to get the additional information that they need. What do you dislike about Planful? The overall knowledge of the help desk needs to be improved for the different Host Analytics quirks within the application. For example, when drill through is enabled within reports, it removes the ability to change periods within the report. The help desk had a hard time researching this issue. ...

"Getting Better"

What do you like best about Planful? I like the enhanced drill-through function. It enables our budget owners to get the additional information that they need. What do you dislike about Planful? The overall knowledge of the help desk needs to be improved for the different Host Analytics quirks within the application. For example, when drill through is enabled within reports, it removes the ability to change periods within the report. The help desk had a hard time researching this issue. ...

"Budgeting & Financial Reporting"

What do you like best about Planful? The ease of use of the Host Analytics software to move from Excel based budgeting and reporting to this platform. What do you dislike about Planful? I do not have any real dislikes of the software other than my own learning curve to use of the system. What problems is Planful solving and how is that benefiting you? We have solved our problem of budgeting to a budget to budgeting to our actual. We have realized the benefits of moving from Excel based ...

"Modeling Functionality Driving results"

What do you like best about Planful? Flexibility to use Modeling for complex calculations and allocations that can then be pushed back into the core applications. What do you dislike about Planful? Nothing at this point. Just getting started What problems is Planful solving and how is that benefiting you? More efficient distribution of performance results to key stakeholders

"Excellent Reporting"

What do you like best about Planful? The most helpful features are having multiple platforms to run reports of our data. The cloud based reporting is quick and easy to use and update. Spotlight XL allows us to provide the same data to our team in a format that they are used to seeing. What do you dislike about Planful? The biggest problem I have had with Host is the program is not intuitive. We had problems with creating new scenarios and were not able to quickly fix our problems. However, ...

"Speed and Flexibility"

What do you like best about Planful? Amazingly fast! Amazingly flexible! tool to use when retrieving data. What do you dislike about Planful? Unavailability of examples in reporting or other tools. What problems is Planful solving and how is that benefiting you? Mainly reporting