Planful vs Chargify

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Our analysts compared Planful vs Chargify based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Accounting Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Planful Software Tool
Chargify Software Tool

Product Basics

Formerly Host Analytics, Planful is a financial planning and analysis cloud platform. It accelerates end-to-end FP&A. Suitable for midsize to large-scale businesses, it helps by centralizing data and managing financial and operational processes.

It helps users plan and manage reviews, approvals and submissions and generates workflow status reports to check the performance of every department. It helps analyze asset performance by using financial budgeting and forecasting techniques with its capital planning feature. It is a scalable solution that allows companies to check the effect of projects on the overall bottom line.
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Chargify is a billing and revenue management system for B2B SaaS companies. Acquired by Scaleworks in 2016, it addresses the complexities associated with recurring bills. It combines the latest technology, extensive subscription expertise and customer service to work on the pain points of the subscription business. With an understanding of the challenges associated with billing and revenue management, it implements the right technology to resolve issues across company portfolios. It removes bottlenecks and empowers the team to launch products, sign up customers and manage the process.
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$1,250 Monthly
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$299 Monthly
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Tailored to your specific needs
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Product Insights

  • Conduct Ad hoc Analysis: Simplify complex ad hoc analysis by quickly creating financial and operational models while simultaneously checking the impact of these models on the bottom line. 
  • Close Books Faster: Decrease the time it takes to close books by automating data collection, aggregation and validation. Make data secure and compliant with standards and protocols.  
  • Improve Collaboration: Collaborate in a more efficient manner with current data and real-time insights. Get the power to make quick and accurate decisions with more confidence.  
  • Get Insights: Make well-informed decisions by gaining insights from across an organization to drive long-term value and growth. Automate manual processes to gain more time for strategic planning processes, analyzing and collaborating rather than worrying about spreadsheets.  
  • Automate Manual Processes: Save time and reduce errors by automating manual financial processes. Ensure that all financial processes are done with minimum manual effort and run more efficiently.  
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  • Improve Efficiency: Digitize every part of accounting, including subscription management, event-based billing, revenue recognition and retention and billing to prevent duplication, manual error and improve accuracy and efficiency. 
  • Accurate Billing: Gain the flexibility to charge, rate and invoice the way a business wants, whether through simple subscription payments or an event-based structure. 
  • Better Insights: Get real-time data to more accurately comprehend the revenue inflow, products and customer behavior. Provide a more complete understanding of the billing pattern and revenue cycle. Make a well-informed decision. 
  • Effective Onboarding: Get quick and assisted implementation with three levels of onboarding support — email, guided, and strategic. Finish the process without signing any contracts, sign-up or transaction fees. 
  • More Affordable: Leverage fixed monthly pricing structure and round-the-clock support provided by dedicated team members without giving up any revenue percentage. Run a subscription management system without any contract, transaction fee or sign-up cost. 
  • Greater Compliance: Ensure that every process is carried out correctly by keeping stringent tax laws and policies in mind. 
  • Flexible Payments: Manage several billing scenarios, including trial periods, setup charges, custom dates, annual or monthly cycles, extra fees for add-ons, by usage, by user, through invoice and automatic payments. 
  • Out-Of-The-Box Functionalities: Get started in minutes with public sign-up pages and a billing portal for consumer-facing subscription management. 
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  • Modern Tools: Combine the need for structured and dynamic planning to empower organizations to make well-informed decisions in a quick and strategic manner.  
  • Financial Consolidation: Accelerate month-end closing cycles with financial consolidation. Enhance financial planning and reporting by leveraging data from a single source of truth. Get pre-built consolidation functionality for currency conversion and reporting, currency translation adjustment calculations and posting. Implement functional, administrative and setup changes without the need for IT experts. Boost teams’ agility when reacting to changes in organization, strategy, regulation and accounting protocol. Ensure trusted and consistent global reporting by automatically mapping financial data. Keep tabs from start to end on balances, and analyze financial data across consolidation activities.  
  • Structured Planning: Save time and reduce errors by automating labor-intensive financial planning activities. Avoid costly and disruptive customization fees, save time and reduce risk of error with predefined planning and reporting templates. Automate integration from any ERP, CRM or HCM. Create a single source of financial truth by automatically collecting, aggregating and validating financial data. Ensure consistency and accuracy by creating and modifying structured financial reports and elevating financial conversations. 
  • Dynamic Planning: Analyze, plan and make confident decisions with dynamic planning. Build custom-tailored financial models. Leverage customization across processes, functions and use cases. Configure planning experiences and give users the flexibility to plan for anything. Connect data sources from separate systems in one unified, cloud-based platform. Boost financial decision making with a single source of truth. Get insights and make course corrections with real-time data refreshing. Inculcate companywide collaboration culture by providing the right data at the right level to the right person.  
  • Integration: Automate data integration to reduce manual intervention and easily transform data with over 200 pre-built connectors. Adjust to automatic data processing with a growing integration platform. Check status and activity of deployed integrations from a centralized place. Ensure data integration process flows are repeatable, automated and secure, and provide audit trails required by internal and external auditors. Understand changes in data with multiple validation points across integration workflows. 
  • Reporting: Leverage reporting formats and delivery options to meet financial, management and ad hoc needs. Ensure data accuracy and transparency with self-service reporting and automated report distribution. Automate collection and aggregation of financial and business data into a single cloud-based platform. Ensure everyone is working with current and accurate information derived from a single source of truth. Boost financial IQ with self-service reporting capabilities. Create a more agile environment with impactful financial decision making. 
  • Annual Operating Plan: Build collaborative financial plans that align with business objectives. Turn annual plans into quarterly or monthly rolling forecasts, and check models for different scenarios to determine how to realign and adjust strategies.  
  • Workforce Planning: Plan accordingly for workforces by connecting HR, finance and operational data together. Create a headcount plan that can be adjusted to changing marketing requirements. Gain insight to build winning strategies and utilize employees as strategic assets. Boost financial IQ to understand and influence impacts on the financial health of workforce costs.  
  • Cash Flow Forecasting: Assess the impact of decisions by gaining complete control and visibility over finances. Reallocate cash by identifying trends and understanding levers. Mitigate cash flow risk by adjusting investment opportunities.  
  • Scenario Analysis: Analyze every option by planning across multiple case scenarios and assessing key drivers. Bring agility by optimizing current period results. Gain the flexibility to discover deeper insights across a broad range of models. Align executives and business partners with data-driven decisions. Check the impact of plan changes from every level with immediate results. 
  • Rolling Forecasts: Adjust to sudden changes, keep forecasts current and business agile with continually rolling planning periods. Automatically keep tabs on the impact of actuals on forecasted trends. Improve risk analysis by quickly identifying opportunities and risks as business landscapes evolve. Align rolling forecasts by collaborating across different departments. Gain real-time insights to redirect resources and priorities and align them with business objectives.  
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  • Subscription Management: Eliminate the compounding management burden on the employees by providing a centralized interface to keep a tab on all the subscription activity. Empower the team with the tool to deliver better customer service, strengthen relationships and increase lifetime value. 
  • Revenue Retention: Prevent payment failure by sending the clients customized emails regarding the end of trial, renewal or credit card expiration. Implement a dunning strategy to communicate with past customers, monitor past-due account reporting and manage the cancellation process. 
  • Billing:
    • Offer Management: Turn the product into a custom catalog with Rapid offer builder, where the customer receives an offer with a unique price that changes over time. Use flexible and customizable pricing and test its elasticity without affecting existing offers. 
    • Event-based Billing: Create multi-dimensional billing models with real-time data streaming and analytics. Bill on value and stay ahead of the marketing trend. 
    • Billing Scenarios: Align pricing strategy by experimenting with different recurring models concerning how consumers use the product. Align monetization, both based and metered, with the way customers consume the data quantity. Maximize revenue growth by combining multiple billing models to create hybrid pricing. 
    • Payments: Connect with Stripe and leverage its automatic card updater feature. Integrate with leading payment gateways to scale payment solutions like Braintree, Forte, Square, BlueSnap and more. Work with various payment gateways and rest assured that the billing is compliant with all the tax laws. 
  • Data and Analytics:
    • Stream: Get pre-configured data infrastructure to power event-driven products. Identify problems in real-time and empower the customer success team to respond to the situation immediately. Build cutting-edge, event-driven products with Stream. 
    • Business Intelligence: Obtain real-time custom analytics with the self-service analytics tools. Use intuitive analytics tools which can help create actionable metrics with customizable dashboards. 
  • Revenue Recognition: Automatically calculate the revenue schedule by checking the billing frequency and transaction price. Ensure accuracy and compliance with the ASC 606 and IFRS 15. Provide the business with a deferred revenue report to help make an informed decision regarding converting it from liability to income. 
  • Integrations: Integrate with CRM, SFDC and other programs such as Avalara, Gmail, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Quickbooks, Slack, Salesforce, SMS by Zapier, Xero and Zendesk. 
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Product Ranking

#116

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Accounting Software

#132

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Accounting Software

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User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 82 reviews
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86%
of users recommend this product

Planful has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 86% when considering 82 user reviews from 2 recognized software review sites.

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4.29 (41)
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4.3 (41)
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Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Streamlined Financial Close: Planful helps automate routine tasks like data consolidation and report generation, which can significantly reduce the time it takes to close the books each month. This efficiency is often praised by users in fast-paced environments.
Improved Forecasting Accuracy: The platform's forecasting tools leverage historical data and predictive analytics to generate more accurate forecasts. Users appreciate this feature as it allows for better-informed decision-making and resource allocation.
Enhanced Collaboration: Planful provides a centralized platform for finance teams to collaborate on budgeting, forecasting, and reporting. This feature improves communication and transparency within the department, leading to more cohesive financial strategies.
Customizable Reporting: Users frequently highlight the ability to create custom reports tailored to their specific needs. This flexibility allows finance teams to analyze data from multiple angles and gain deeper insights into their financial performance.
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Flexible Billing Options: Chargify accommodates various billing models, including subscriptions, one-time purchases, usage-based billing, and hybrid models, making it suitable for diverse business needs.
Automated Recurring Billing: Chargify automates recurring billing processes, reducing manual effort and ensuring timely payments. It handles proration, discounts, and taxes, streamlining the billing cycle.
Revenue Recognition: Chargify assists with revenue recognition by providing reports and tools that align with accounting standards. This helps businesses accurately track and report revenue, ensuring compliance and financial transparency.
Integrations: Chargify integrates with various payment gateways, accounting software, and other business tools, enabling seamless data flow and process automation. This reduces manual data entry and improves efficiency.
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Steep Learning Curve: Many users find Planful's interface to be complex and unintuitive, requiring significant time investment to learn the system's intricacies. The abundance of features can be overwhelming for new users, leading to frustration and a slow adoption rate within organizations.
Customization Challenges: While Planful offers customization options, implementing them often requires advanced technical skills or reliance on the vendor's professional services, which can be costly. This limitation can hinder organizations with unique workflows or reporting needs from fully tailoring the software to their specific requirements.
Reporting Limitations: Some users report that generating specific or ad-hoc reports can be cumbersome in Planful. The system's pre-built reports may not always cater to every organization's needs, and creating custom reports may require technical expertise or additional support.
Performance Issues: A segment of users has mentioned experiencing slow loading times and occasional system lags, particularly when working with large datasets or complex reports. This can impact productivity and user satisfaction, especially for organizations with high data volumes or demanding reporting requirements.
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Limited Accounting Software Integrations: While Chargify integrates with Xero and QuickBooks Online, it lacks direct integration with other popular accounting software, potentially requiring manual data exports and imports, which can be time-consuming and prone to errors.
Complex Revenue Recognition: Chargify's revenue recognition features may not be suitable for businesses with complex revenue recognition requirements, such as those with multi-year contracts or subscription upgrades/downgrades, potentially necessitating manual adjustments or workarounds.
Customization Challenges: Some users find Chargify's customization options to be limited, particularly for invoices and customer communications, which may not align with specific branding or workflow preferences.
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Planful has garnered a reputation for its robust financial reporting and analysis capabilities, particularly excelling in budgeting, forecasting, and consolidation. Users appreciate the software's ability to handle complex financial models and its flexibility in generating custom reports. The platform's intuitive interface and user-friendly design have also been praised, making it accessible to both finance professionals and non-financial users. However, some users have noted that the initial setup and implementation process can be time-consuming and may require significant support from Planful's team. Additionally, while Planful offers a wide range of features, some users have expressed a desire for more advanced functionality in areas such as workforce planning and project accounting. Compared to competitors like Adaptive Insights and Vena Solutions, Planful stands out for its comprehensive financial consolidation capabilities and its ability to handle large volumes of data. Its reporting and analytics tools are also considered to be more user-friendly and customizable. However, Adaptive Insights may be a better choice for organizations seeking a more cloud-based solution with stronger integrations with other business applications. Vena Solutions, on the other hand, may be more suitable for companies with complex financial modeling needs due to its Excel-based interface. Overall, Planful is best suited for mid-sized to large enterprises with complex financial reporting and analysis requirements. Its strengths lie in its budgeting, forecasting, consolidation, and reporting capabilities, making it an ideal choice for organizations looking to streamline their financial processes and gain deeper insights into their financial performance. However, companies with limited IT resources or those seeking a more cloud-based solution may want to consider alternative options.

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Chargify helps businesses manage their recurring revenue and billing processes. Users appreciate its user-friendly interface and flexibility, making it a breeze to set up subscriptions, handle payments, and generate invoices. The platform's scalability is another plus, allowing it to grow alongside your business. Chargify also plays well with other popular business tools like Salesforce and QuickBooks, streamlining your workflow. However, Chargify isn't without its downsides. Some users find the price tag a bit steep, especially for smaller businesses or startups. Additionally, it lacks certain features like multi-currency support, which can be a dealbreaker for companies with international customers. While Chargify might not be the perfect fit for every business, it's a solid choice for those needing a reliable and scalable solution to manage their recurring revenue. Its ease of use and integration capabilities make it particularly well-suited for businesses that value efficiency and want to avoid the headaches of manual billing processes.

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