Trintech and Planful Partnership

by Ogo Nwanyanwu, SAPinsider, Research Director, Financial Management & Technology

Trintech and Planful Announce Strategic Global Partnership

Trintech, a financial close automation software company, and Planful, a cloud financial planning & analysis (FP&A) software company, recently announced a strategic global partnership. The agreement provides mid-sized organizations with integrated, automation solutions for end-to-end finance and accounting processes.   

Grant Halloran, CEO of Planful, comments on the opportunity with Trintech, “This strategic partnership with Adra® by Trintech is perfectly complementary from a product, company culture, and geographical markets perspective—we’re excited to combine these powerful products for our rapidly expanding customer base around the world, and work with the wonderful team at Trintech.”

Partnership Speaks to Financial Process Pain Points of SAPinsider Members 

With positive execution of the partnership, Trintech and Planful can enhance the combined product utility across financial processes that represent the most critical areas of complexity for the SAPinsider community, according to our data. Respondents in our benchmark report on SAP S/4HANA Finance, confirm “budget and financial planning” (61.19% of respondents), “financial close” (57.46%), “business intelligence & analytics” (41.07%), as the top 3 financial process, pain points across their organizations.  

The combination will take the form of a mutual reseller agreement, between the Adra by Trintech solution and the Planful platform, allowing both companies to ramp up international growth initiatives across important regions. Trintech enjoys a strong customer base in Europe, while Planful’s customer base is focused on North America. Together the two companies have more than 4,500 customers in over 100 countries. Strong execution of the partnership would deliver cross-selling opportunities globally for both companies. 

The ability to resell each other’s products will allow their mutual customer base to benefit from integrated functionality, such as: 

• Financial Planning: Planning, budgeting, forecasting, including cash flow 
• Operational Planning: Revenue, inventory, demand planning, along with sales and operations planning 
• Close Management: Data validation, account mapping, workflows, account reconciliation, and accruals 
• Financial Consolidation: Intercompany eliminations, foreign currency, and GAAP/IFRS regulations 
• Reporting and Analysis: Variance analysis, performance analytics, and financial and management reporting 

Darren Heffernan, President, Mid-Market at Trintech, notes, “This partnership and product integration provides finance and accounting professionals the opportunity to accelerate insight-driven analysis for the business in a frictionless environment.”

Combined Solutions May Generate Strong Interest from SAPinsider Community 

Our research points to strong potential SAPinsider community interest in the complementary product utility of Adra® by Trintech and the Planful platform.  Benchmark report respondents highlighted “delivering real-time insight and analysis” and “improving efficiency with finance operations to free resources for higher-value tasks,” as the top strategies prioritized at their organizations to address top drivers. 

Through the integration of Adra and Planful, the companies hope to provide a more streamlined end-user experience for their shared customers. The concept of a “frictionless environment” across finance and accounting functions, is an exciting value proposition according to one of their shared customers, Condado Tacos, a Columbus, Ohio based restaurant chain with over 20 locations across the midwest. 

“We’re excited to have a complete solution to manage all of our planning and accounting functions, including FP&A, reconciliation and close,” said Anthony Reitzel, Controller at Condado Tacos. “This integration streamlines reconciliation and gives finance and accounting professionals more time to engage in analysis and other strategic functions that add value to the business.”

What does this mean for SAPinsiders? 

• Best-in-class organizations continue to prioritize real-time visibility. To support enhanced decision making and insight across business units, finance and accounting teams must reduce complexity across end-to-end financial processes to focus on higher-value activities such as financial reporting, analysis, and planning. 
• Accelerating demand for end-to-end financial cloud solutions. Current hybrid and virtual workforce models increase the complexity of operating siloed, vertical workflows. Organizations require proper governance and controls to implement and optimize horizontal process orchestration. Cloud solutions, including the offerings from Trintech and Planful, can simplify task management across varied workforce environments to support global process ownership. 
• SaaS financial automation providers continue to pair up. The financial automation landscape has seen  partnership announcements, including BlackLine-and-Kyriba-combine-to-improve-financial-close-management/">BlackLine and Kyriba, as well as Serrala-secures-majority-investment-from-hg/">Serrala and Hg, most recently. SAP ERP system and mutual customers of the partner companies will benefit from an enhanced customer experience via more streamlined integrations. Any addition functionality will require a wait and see approach to understand the complete nature of these partnership announcements. 

Ogo Nwanyanwu, SAPinsider, Research Director,  Financial Management & Technology, can be reached at ogo.nwanyanwu@wispubs.com