PlanHQ Wants to Make Achieving Business Plans Easier
PlanHQ is a web based business plan tool that wants to help small and medium businesses to more effectively manage their teams, financials, and, most importantly, their projects. While it has obvious similarities to the popular project management tool Basecamp, PlanHQ's approach is quite distinct from Basecamp's and invites its users to keep an eye on the bigger picture goals.
One aspect of PlanHQ we noticed throughout the application is that the design is minimalist, but also very flexible, which makes it not only easy to use almost all of the functionality of PlanHQ right from the beginning, but it also takes away a lot of the apprehension that quite a few people might have when using a serious business planning tool like this.
Getting Started
After signing up, you will be greeted with the currently empty dashboard, which gives you a few shortcuts to start customizing your plan with your company logo, invite your team members, and create your first goal.
As you customize your plan, you also get the option to set a default currency for your financial information. The default currencies are Dollars, Euros, Yen, and Pounds, but you can also change this to any other currency you might need.
Setting Goals
You goals can only fall into three categories: Solutions, Marketing and Sales, or Organization. While this simplicity makes sure that you do not unnecessarily complicate things by starting to micro-manage your goals, some companies might find this too limiting. On the other hand, as the folks at Organized Wisdom point out, PlanHQ is not so much a project management tool, but "an action management tool."
Correction: You can actually create your own categories, though this function is a bit hidden and can only be found in the settings menu. The folks at PlanHQ assured as that they were going to make this more obvious and add more links to these customization options in a couple of spots throughout the site.
The overall process of creating a goal is quite simple and asks you to define your goal, the importance of that goal, the team members responsible for achieving it, and, optionally, you can also send a message about the goal to your team and board members. Of course, you can also set the deadline for your goal here.
As is typical in this kind of application, once a goal is created, other users can comment on it and add attachment to it as well.
As you add more goals, you can then later reschedule them, mark them as done etc. PlanHQ will keep track of this and will gently remind you if you start falling behind at some point.
As PlanHQ's founder Tim Norton told us, some customers also use the goals feature as a bug tracking tool, with the advantage that all team members can easily keep an eye on the development instead of the developers working only in the silo of their own system.
Financials
The 'Financials' section of PlanHQ follows the same guidelines as the goal setting section, in that it tries to keep things simple, but without dumbing down the process. You can add information about your budget and actual expenses here and based on this, PlanHQ creates a number of graphs and general statistics indicating if you are on your path to profitability yet. It's important to note that PlanHQ here is trying to give you a general overview of your financials and that it is not a complete financial planning tool.
What was missing here, we thought, was the ability to import or export any of this data. However, we have heard from PlanHQ that they are planning on adding the ability to import and export spreadsheet in the near future and that they are especially considering some form of integration with the spreadsheet component in Google Docs.
Cost
PlanHQ offers a three month free trial for RWW readers, but after that, you will have to sign up for a paid plan. PlanHQ offers three different plans, ranging from $9 a month for a plan with 3 team members and 10 active goals, to the 'Small' plan for $24 a month and 15 active goals, up to the 'Pro' plan, which offers an unlimited number of team members as goals. Both the 'Small' as well as the 'Pro' plan include the ability to set private goals and connect through a secure SSL connection.
What About Basecamp?
Basecamp, at first sight, would be the closest direct competitor to PlanHQ (even the URLs are similar, after all). But even though they share a lot of functionality (to-dos, writeboard, milestones, etc., PlanHQ is more focused on teams and achieving goals. During our tests, it seemed that using PlanHQ would make it easier to focus on the big picture, while Basecamp seemed to invite more micro-managing.
Signing Up
PlanHQ is giving our readers a special deal: while you would normally only get a 30 day free trial, signing up through this link will get your thee months of free service.
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This might be interesting... But the first thing I noticed is that they have already reneged on their special 3 month offer to RWW readers. When I click the affiliate link you included: http://app.planhq.com/affiliates/readwriteweb it redirects to the normal sign in page and there is no notice of or option for the 3 month sign up.
I would be more impressed if they either lived up to their RWW promise, or provided reassurance that I am getting the RWW 90 day trial when I start the sign up process.
Since they ask us to trust them with our confidential data, perhaps they should be more careful about living up to their other promises.
Hmmm... this article cool, congratulations!
hugging!
I just had a conversation with some one about goal setting, especially in terms of financial goals. So the timing of your post is very much appreciated. I'm definitely going to try it. That said, the three months free, as opposed to one, link doesn't seem to work.
@ Brian - I haven't signed up but it does set a cookie before you redirect: affiliate_code = readwriteweb.
They should make it more clear though.
We used Basecamp for about 2 months before changing over to PlanHQ.
Basecamp was great for building a ToDo list but it really wasn't helping us in getting things done.
As Frederic points out PlanHQ is particularly goal oriented and has considerably helped us in increasing our productivity over the past 2 months.
I have asked PlanHQ to give us an update about the three month offer and I will post an update once I hear back from them. Sorry for any confusion.
Hey guys,
Sorry about the confusion,
You will all get 3 months free trial!! and we are tracking all links from this page so that your accounts will all be set to 3 month free trial, so please be assured you will definitely get 3 months free.
I will see if we can get the sign-up page showing this when you click through so it's clear,
Apologies again for the confusion,
Tim
PlanHQ
Just signed up over half an hour ago and still didn't get my login info, frustrating for starters. But it looks like its worth the wait...
Hi Razan,
Thanks - Ive just mailed you, unfortunately you mistyped your email address as .ocm instead of .com, its getting corrected for you now and your account resent,
Cheers,
Tim
What makes this tool interesting is that the whole basis of a business plan, and the methodologies of tracking, measuring, actioning and delivering are consolidated into a single place. This forces the users to follow these basic business necessities without the need to do a Finance degree.
http://business-vs-technology.blogspot.com/
I signed up but the initial password that was sent to me via email didn't work. I had to reset the password and then I was able to login. FYI
Users: When you select a plan, choose the expensive one. You aren't paying/committing, and I think a valuable test-drive should always be on the full functioning product.
PlanHQ: I think a valuable test-drive should always be on the full functioning product. You aren't requiring CC information anyway, so you could skip that page and just make the default for the free trial the Pro Package. After 30 days you're going to need permission to bill, so the plan can be selected then.
I too want the 3 month trial, thanks Tim!
I have used PlanHQ for the past 3 weeks and love it!
Owning a New Zealand Start-up online gallery I have about a million things to think of and do and this has helped increase my productivity immensely.
I have also been in Wellington for the past week to promote the site and meet tertiary institutes. I emailed Tim Norton the week before I came up to see if he was free to meet up and he replied back offering me to use their office (http://www.siliconwelly.com) as my base for the week!
The past week based at the PlanHQ office has been amazing and they are constantly working on improving the site and usability.
I'm sold on both Wellington (moving here asap) and PlanHQ (subscribing at the end of this week).
Great people and great product/service = customers!!
Highly recommended.
As a serial entrepreneur, I can tell you first hand that using PlanHQ is a "game changer"....a product/service that helps change the entire way you think about and manage your business. We've been committed PlanHQ fans for the past six months and I can tell you from experience that this product helps teams communicate more efficiently and helps everyone think about the business in a whole new way. It's all there...set goals...assign actions....be assigned actions, update each other, check in on progress, refine goals. With PlanHQ, everyone is on the same page. Every feature or change we've ever suggested to them has either been integrated in or a better version of what we suggested has been integrated in OR, they've given a good reason why it shouldn't be integrated in. I use it 20x a day and can't imagine building a business without it.