PlanWin is designed for the work of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation of program work with a particular focus on international relief and development agencies. PlanWin addresses the data management needs of multiple parts of an organization including program staff at all levels of the organization, communications staff, and development or fund raising.

The flexible, structured design provides a coherent, consistent way to organize a large amount of information in a way that can be easily navigated.

The backbone or central organizing mechanism in PlanWin is a data structure that defines the relationships of the major organizational units as well as the data elements used in the database. The data elements can be selected from a pallet of about 18 types of forms. Additionally, the forms or data elements may have many options that control how it works.

This provides a consistent, coherent structure for the data which allows users to readily understand what data is expected and where to look for it.

The data entry screens are designed to allow quick access to content while managing appropriate permissions. There are also search or filtering capabilities to allow finding the desired information in the database.

PlanWin includes extensive reporting capabilities. You define a set of standard reports which are easily accessed and run with a few clicks of the mouse. If further reporting is required, a library of custom reports can be defined and run. Additionally, external reporting and data analytics tools can also be configured to access the database.

There is a full-text index on all content (excluding file attachments) which provides fast search/lookup capabilities.

PlanWin uses a distributed client-server database model. This means there can be a variety of configurations based on the need.

• The central offices can have a single database accessed by multiple users on a local area network.
• Program office staff can have their own copies of the databases (or a subset of the database) in their office.
• Administrators can have a copy of the database on a laptop for use while out of the office.

All the databases communicate with each other using data replication. This allows a very flexible configuration that can work in challenging data communications locations (i.e. locations without reliable Internet) and by staff who wish to access their database while travelling.

PlanWin provides multiple applications (platforms) to access the database:

• PlanWin is a Windows desktop application.
• PlanWeb is the web-based version of the application. Note, this does not include the accounting functionality. 
• FASWin is a Windows desktop application to access the accounting functionality. 

PlanWin and PlanWeb provide essentially the same capabilities with the exception that the database administrative capabilities are all handled via the PlanWin (Windows application).