We’ve had lots of feedback from PlanHQ customers and trial users who didn’t stick around after their trial. While we’ve kept making little updates everyday, we’ve also been working towards a major new release, and we’re happy to say that we’re going live today. Thanks heaps to everyone who takes the time to talk to us, PlanHQ will keep getting better because of you.

Making progress towards your plan every day

The biggest change we’ve made in this latest release is to get you and your team focused on the actions you need to take every week that make sure you achieve your goals.

Much more goodness to come

We’ve got a lot more to come, but this new release is a major step in the direction of getting you and your team in front of your plan everyday. Any thoughts at all just let us know by firing an email to support at PlanHQ.com

Most people who have made a business plan before know the big issue is that it gets out of date quickly and you have no way of tracking your progress to achieve it. PlanHQ has been designed to solve this problem, and enable you to easily set targets, and achieve them. The Wall Street Journal has a website dedicated to Startups called Startup Journal and they’ve just done a quick review of PlanHQ.

PlanHQ is an online business planning and growth tool, but its not just a piece of software, its an approach to managing your business growth, and is designed around some smart business experience and thinking. A cool website that reviews smart web sites and software called Work Happy - Killer Resources for Entrepreneurs, has just done a review of PlanHQ

Work Happy Says:

“It’s greatest benefit is how it challenges you to think through and answer for the whole business picture of your venture.”

“As you’re working through your strategy, goals, competitive analysis, market analysis, sales forecasts, etc. it’s like having a very detail-oriented MBA coaching you. If you’re like most entrepreneurs (one big part passion, and one small part business training) this is an excellent tool to help you get your act together”

We’ve just last week made our billing operational so can take credit card payments and you can manage your PlanHQ account from within your plan, view your past invoices and upgrade/downgrade your account.

I know some of you probably hoped you’d be on a free trial forever, but we figured PlanHQ should start making some money as well as spending it. And it really is nice to see people move from trial users to happy paying customers. Thanks to the first round of customers who have and are signing up, we got our first credit card just a few minutes after emailing everyone from Thomas Stokell who said “Number 1 Customer, Stoked!”

Automated Secure Billing

Taking credit cards online can take quite a bit of setup, and its something you always want to get just right. We’ve built plenty of ecommerce sites before, but with PlanHQ we basically had to build an automated recurring billing engine, which is working great. But theres also getting the merchant account active and plugging into a secure payment gateway who manage the payment and hold your credit card details. If you live in the US the second two of these things are pretty quick to setup, but it usually takes a bit longer in New Zealand and you really rely on the providers pulling through if you want it done quickly.

Online Credit Card Processing

While there are several banks that offer internet merchant accounts, in New Zealand only BNZ currently provide $USD merchant accounts. BNZ broke all the records for us and had our internet merchant account taking $USD’s in 3 working days and our payment gateway provider DPS followed up with a 5 hour turnaround to activate us on the payment gateway so we were up and running exactly when we scheduled.

Very nice work here guys, thanks Amy Huang from the BNZ for pushing things through, and the crew at DPS. It’s been all pluses on the banking front recently, ANZ have been great at quickly approving a loan for working capital over the phone and our new bank ASB for PlanHQ got us up and rocking with accounts and had a $NZD merchant account ready to go in less than 24 hours, thanks Andi.

To provide you an even more reliable and fast PlanHQ service, we’ve just over the weekend upgraded our hosting service to a more scalable, faster platform with our new partners at Engine Yard. Big thanks to Koz at our end for taking Saturday morning+ to make this happen so quickly and smoothly and Ezra and the crew at Engine Yard. To get an idea of the service and infrastructure PlanHQ is now running on, and the complete service we get from Engine Yard, checkout the details here: Very Scalable Hosting.

Hosting and 24×7 Partner

Partnering with Engine Yard to host and keep PlanHQ alive 24×7 is a really good move for you. What it means is an even more reliable and consistently fast PlanHQ service. I’ll be putting more information up about this soon, as after spending over 7 years involved in web hosted businesses, I’m very impressed with the Engine Yard service and am confident this is one of the best solutions on the market. Its not just a hosting platform, it’s a full service that keeps PlanHQ alive, including the time and support of some very talented and experienced people. For more information click here for PlanHQ Security and Disaster Recovery.

Sorry if PlanHQ was a bit slow at the end of last week

We’ve had quite a bit of activity over the last 5 days on PlanHQ following our public launch, and prior to us making the shift in hosting platforms detailed above, some of you would have experienced PlanHQ going quite slow at certain times. We’ve been keeping a close eye on the speed of PlanHQ, and Koz worked extra hard to get us over onto our new platform at Engine Yard as quick as possible to minimise the effect of reasonably high PlanHQ usage.

We’ve over the course of the last few days launched PlanHQ our online business planning software.

New Website

The launch not only brings the first publicly available version of PlanHQ, but also a new website. (Thanks Nat for some wonderful work here). If you’re reading this post on a News Reader, then pop over and check us out at http://www.planhq.com

Leading up to Launch

We’ve been developing PlanHQ for the last 5 months, and for the last 3 months have been fortunate to have about 250 beta customers trialling PlanHQ and giving us feedback, so that we could have PlanHQ ready and tested by businesses before we launched publicly.

Things are running really flat-out around here right now, and with things progressing well leading up to a public launch of PlanHQ, I’ve been in hiring mode. We’ve just taken Nik Wakelin on board and he’s plugged in to the team super quick, very impressed!

Nik and Oli

Nik joins PlanHQ after the lest few months with another Silicon Welly startup Hire Things.

The young Cats going hard

Oliver Clarke has been on board the crew for the last few months, and really kicked some ass, I’m not sure we mentioned him at the time, but he was again someone who I found through a program here called summer of code where we get a bunch of the most on to it people part way through Uni and get them in amongst cool web start-ups. Oli stood out from the pack, and impressed me from the start. Oli has since been pumping through the development of PlanHQ soaking up the best of Koz an Ben and working close with Nat.

Magic Team

The best teams are made of magic individuals that gel together, and I’m wrapped that We’ve got a very cool well balanced mix, big thanks to the team, Loving making this happen together!

It’s taken a little longer than expected, and a lot of people have been asking and waiting for this, so we’re really excited to let you know that we’ve now got financials live in PlanHQ, It’s as simple as entering data in a spreadsheet but as powerful as looking a dashboard on your business.

It’s been pretty full-on getting this working just right, and it’s come along way from a vision of little green arrows of success in my head, discussions with Rod about collaborative budgeting, to paper drawings, and working close with my 3rd arm (nat) to design something simple and beautiful. Koz and Ben have done a really great job of bringing this to life and Oliver has continued to tweak up everything to completion. Big thanks to the PlanHQ team

Keeping it Real

I’ve done plenty of sales forecasting and budgeting over the last half a dozen years, and like most entrepreneurs and business managers, what you initially forecast is often quite a long way off what actually happens. So I’ve made it so that you can easily update your actual data as it comes to hand and see how you’re racking against forecast. If you’re way out, you’ll get big red indicators telling you how much you’re out by helping you adjust your forecasts until they’re close to reality!

Improved Investor Confidence and Valuation

If you’re managing an investor relationship or looking for investment then you want to get the best valuation you can for the business, and to do this you need to give investors confidence in your forecasts. And now with planHQ you and your investors can quickly see at a glance how you’re performing and how good you are at achieving your targets.

Keep the feedback coming, get in and use this and tell us what you think.