CalCPA Cuts Monthly Reporting From 8 Hours to 30 Minutes With Planful

CalCPA is a leading nonprofit professional association representing CPAs and finance professionals across California. As a trusted voice in advocacy, education, and professional development, the organization plays a central role in shaping the accounting profession in the state and nationwide. To support that mission, CalCPA relies on accurate, timely financial insight to guide decision-making and serve its members effectively.

With Planful in place, CalCPA has:

• Reduced monthly reporting time by 90% (from 8 hours to 30 minutes), eliminating manual Excel work and redirecting finance toward higher-value analysis.
• Accelerated the annual budgeting cycle by two weeks by collaborating in real time and replacing five disconnected versions with one unified process.
• Created a single source of truth for budgeting and reporting, giving budget managers shared visibility to see the full picture and close gaps together.
• Empowered true self-service reporting, allowing non-finance teams to investigate performance independently and come to finance with informed, strategic questions.
• Delivered real-time executive insight, empowering the CFO to answer “where are we this month?” instantly, not after building reports.

Before Planful, CalCPA operated in a fragmented planning and reporting environment that relied heavily on manual spreadsheets and disconnected systems. Budgeting, reporting, and the general ledger all lived in separate tools. The lack of integration forced finance into extensive manual work, diverting time away from strategic analysis and decision support.

“I lived in a world that lacked integration between the budgeting software, financial package, and reporting,” said Natalie Quan, CFO at CalCPA.

Every month, data had to be downloaded, remapped, and uploaded between systems just to assemble reports. Every new account or change after close required hours of rework.

The disconnected environment’s lack of integration slowed decision-making across the organization. Budget owners couldn’t see real-time performance and had to wait days for finance to prepare updated reports.

“If my CEO asked where we were for the month, I’d have to say, ‘I’ll get back to you in half an hour or an hour’,” said Natalie. “It was a lot of time spent just doing busy work versus being able to analyze the numbers up front.”

Given its role as a leader in the accounting profession, CalCPA approached its planning technology decision with the same financial rigor it promotes to its members. The organization conducted a competitive evaluation, bringing together finance and key business stakeholders to identify a platform that could scale across its organization. Ease of use and accessibility beyond finance emerged as critical decision factors.

Planful stood out for its ability to deliver:

• Intuitive reporting and data entry
• Seamless, out-of-the-box integration with Sage Intacct
• Finance-owned report building and customization
• Built-in transparency for non-finance stakeholders

“Planful came out ahead for the user experience and the ease of running reports,” said Natalie.

Integrations were especially important for CalCPA. The organization’s previous system could not integrate with Sage Intacct without a prohibitively expensive custom build, limiting scalability. Planful integrated seamlessly from day one, immediately unifying actuals, budgeting, and reporting within a single connected environment.

Seamless integration quickly translated into automation. “With Planful, Sage Intacct integrated seamlessly,” said Natalie. “Every night a feed comes in, and if I need to refresh during the day, I can do that in about a minute.”

• Automated monthly reporting: Actuals update automatically in Planful nightly through the Sage Intacct integration, eliminating manual uploads and ensuring reporting is always based on the latest data.
• Multi-entity consolidation: Financials across three CalCPA entities are consolidated within Planful, reducing reporting preparation time from 8 hours to just 30 minutes.
• Real-time drill-down and variance analysis: Budget managers can drill directly into underlying transactions within Planful, accelerating issue resolution and improving the accuracy of financial reviews.
• AI-powered forecasting: Planful Projections automatically populates forecasts by rolling actuals forward and carrying budget data into future periods, allowing finance to focus on adjustments rather than manual data entry.
• Role-based, self-service access for business leaders: Budget managers have secure access to their own data and visibility into how their budgets connect across departments, fostering accountability and collaborative gap-closing.

Planful has reshaped how finance supports the organization at CalCPA, shifting it from a reactive reporting function into a real-time strategic partnership.

Speed across Finance’s processes

Planful compressed CalCPA’s monthly reporting cycle from eight hours to 30 minutes and automated the flow of actuals into forecasting, eliminating manual updates across reporting periods.

Annual budgeting saw a similar transformation. By consolidating five departmental versions into one real-time, collaborative framework, CalCPA simplified the planning process and closed the budget two weeks earlier than in prior years.

“We only had one version of the budget instead of five,” said Natalie. “Everyone worked together in real time to close the gap.”

That same real-time visibility now extends beyond budgeting into day-to-day executive decision-making.

Emphasis on decision support

With real-time access to accurate financial data, finance spends less time preparing reports and more time supporting leadership decisions.

Instead of telling executives she’ll follow up later, Natalie can now answer questions in the moment.

“I just open up Planful and can answer the question right away.”

This immediacy allows Natalie and her executive counterparts to make more informed decisions and reinforces finance’s role as a trusted strategic partner across the organization.

Cultural impact across the team

Non-finance teams now go directly to Planful for answers, improving collaboration and reducing dependency on finance for routine requests.

“People come to me now and say, ‘I looked in Planful and had this question,’ instead of asking where to find the information,” said Natalie. “That’s instinctively where they’re going now, before they even ask us a question.”

This shift has empowered budget managers to take greater ownership of their numbers. Budget managers investigate variances on their own and now only reach out to finance when they hit genuine roadblocks.

With a unified planning foundation in place, CalCPA has adopted Planful AI Analyst Assistant and is exploring its capabilities.

Natalie is especially interested in enabling budget managers and non-finance users to ask questions in natural language to receive real-time answers without relying on finance as an intermediary.

“What I’m looking forward to most is the ability for budget managers and non-financial users to ask questions in their natural language and get real-time answers instead of coming to us,” said Natalie.

As AI adoption grows, CalCPA’s goal is to further reduce manual effort while empowering teams across the organization to become more financially confident and informed.

“I feel like we’ve only scratched the surface of what Planful can do,” said Natalie.