At Planful Perform 2025, held in Miami, Planful made a series of announcements with new capabilities powered by AI, enhancements to Workforce Pro and Consolidations Premium, new marketing forecast features.
Planful also announced new connectors for Tableau and Snowflake.
Steve Welsh, Chief Product Officer, Planful. “Finance teams are overwhelmed by the explosion of data, the accelerating pace of business, and mounting pressure to deliver real-time insights, faster than ever before.
“That’s why we’re investing in AI-assisted solutions that automate routine tasks, foster collaboration, and spark innovation. The growing talent shortage only amplifies the urgency. From tailored assistants for controllers and analysts to expanded Workforce Pro, enhanced Consolidations, and new forecasting and integration features, we’re equipping finance teams to stay ahead of the curve and meet today’s challenges with confidence.”
Planful AI brings Assistants to Work
Planful AI already helps organisations across three pillars of Detect, Forecast, and Help. It is also adding a fourth, Analyze. At Perform, Planful launched three persona-based AI assistants and announced that it would also roll out at least three more in the near future. The upcoming assistants will include a Business Analyst, Modeller, and Administrator.
The three assistants that are now available under an early adopter program are:
- Analyst: Provides variance insights, narrative generation, report analysis, and scenario building to support financial analysts.
- Planner: Supports financial planners with forecasting and scenario optimisation.
- Controller: Provides compliance reviews and automated adjustments to support controllers.
The assistants aim to assist employees with tasks, automatiing many of the manual tasks they do day to day, enabling them to deliver greater value to their organisations.
Planful customer Kimball Midwest is a maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) distributor with over 2,000 employees across the US. Kevin Washek, Director FP&A, Kimball Midwest said, “Planful and the AI capabilities have helped our team significantly reduce repetitive tasks, allowing the team to provide better strategic support across the company. For us, it is a game changer.
“Before Planful, we were often bogged down with time-consuming, non-value-add tasks. Planful has opened the door to efficiency for our team, and with AI, we plan on taking it to the next level.”
Workforce Pro
Planful also revealed Workforce Pro, first announced last month, a powerful enhancement to its proven Workforce Planning solution. This solution already helps teams move faster with real-time forecasting, scenario modelling, and built-in automation.
Workforce Pro connects data between HR and Finance, enabling organisations to plan with greater flexibility and granularity. With real-time access to both finance and HR data, HR leaders can better understand the financial impact of potential decisions.
In volatile times, finance leaders can better understand the impact of changes to personnel, both current and future. The solution allows finance to optimise spend turnover costs and maximise every headcount dollar.
Workforce Pro delivers access to a powerful set of advanced workforce planning capabilities, including:
- Granular Cost Transparency: Analyzes compensation trends and cost drivers to precisely manage the workforce to plan.
- Custom Compensation Logic: Handles bonuses, commissions, and complex pay structures with ease.
- Live Headcount Tracking: Monitor hires, exits, and role changes in real time.
Octavio Cubero, Vice President of Finance at Pixelogic Media, enthused, “With Workforce Pro, we connected every workforce change back to financial impact. Our teams made faster decisions, and variance is down.”
Consolidations Premium
For structurally complex organisations, Planful has further enhanced its Consolidations solution. Consolidations Premium enables the office of the CFO to manage complex ownership structures with flexibility, visibility, and control. Consolidation is often one of the most time-consuming aspects of the period close for some organisations, and new capabilities will help ease that burden. The new capabilities include:
- Visualisations and Sub-Consolidations: Visual organisation chart and built-in support for sub-consolidations, non-controlling interest, and group consolidations.
- Automation and Flexibility: Automated eliminations and currency conversion at any level, and flexible calculation logic for configured calculations across any dimension.
New Marketing forecast capability
Forecasting in marketing is a challenge for many. However, Planful is well placed to assist marketers with the new features it unveiled at Perform. The new features will enable marketers to create forecasts against budgets at every level. The solution will help them to better anticipate spend timing to drive financial performance.
Planful has published a useful guideline on the 9 steps towards creating more accurate marketing forecasts. It suggests that funnel metrics such as web visits, leads, MQLs, SQLs, sales, and revenue can help create accurate forecasts. Certainly, any solution that replaces spreadsheets is likely to be more automated and enable marketing to spend less time crunching data and more time delivering campaigns.
Snowflake Connector
A new Snowflake native connector will enable users to load GL, transaction, ESM, and segment hierarchy data directly by querying Snowflake within Planful. Planful identified several key benefits that this new connector delivers:
- Accelerates Data Integration: It enables direct data access from Snowflake, reducing the time and effort required to load financial data into Planful.
- Enhances Flexibility: Offers more options for data ingestion, allowing teams to choose the integration method that best fits their tech stack.
- Improves Data Accuracy: Eliminates manual data transfers, reducing the risk of errors and ensuring consistency across systems.
- Supports Scalability: This feature is ideal for organisations with large, complex datasets, making it easier to scale data operations as business needs grow.
- Boosts Operational Efficiency: Streamlines data workflows, allowing finance teams to focus more on analysis and less on data preparation.
Tableau Connector
The new native Tableau connector simplifies data transfers between the two systems. Tableau users can now easily view, analyse and display Planful data with the business intelligence platform.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
If you can’t attend the event, the Perform25 sessions will soon be available on demand. Planful has made a significant number of new product announcements at the event or just before it. The new AI agents will be interesting to examine in detail. European customers will be able to have a closer look at Perform Europe, which is being held in London between June 4th and 5th.
With these announcements, Planful continues to push the boundaries of what planning means within organisations. Leveraging a single centralised solution across all departments makes sense.
