Best Practice: Tuning up your Planful Application for 2023

Just as your car needs a tune up every now and then to make sure it is running efficiently, so does your Planful application. The new year is a great time to do some housekeeping!

Below is the perfect checklist for your 2023 Planful Tune Up:

1. Review End Users – Are there users still active who are no longer with the company? Perhaps these users have been gone a while and can be deleted completely? Did any users change roles in the last year? If so, check that their security was properly updated.
2. Scenario Clean Up – Do you have 25 versions of 2023 Budget still in Planful? Once that final version is locked down, clean up the list by deleting all the other versions that are no longer needed. Do you still need all the 2022 Forecasts now that the year is closed? If not, you can delete those scenarios too. If you are worried about deleting something forever, export the data to Excel and save it. If you ever need the data again you have it and could import it back into Planful.
3. Reporting Review – From the File Cabinet, click on Export to Excel to get a full list of all reports in your application. Once the list is ready, download and open it to see all the reports in your application, the folder path to each of them and the Last Date Used. You can use this list to plan clean-up of your reporting inventory.
4. Data Retention – Do you have a Corporate Data Retention Policy that dictates how much data should be kept? The beginning of the year is a great time to ensure Planful is compliant.
5. Template Clean Up – Do you have old templates that are no longer in use? First, consider re-naming them to start with “Z_” so the fall to the bottom of the list. Next, by cleaning up scenarios (see item 2), can you now delete some old templates no longer needed? Remember deleting a template will delete the data attached to it, so make sure the scenario is deleted first.

While none of these activities are required on an annual basis, completing them can help you head into the new year with a streamlined Planful application to hit the ground running in 2023!