Workday Adaptive Planning Review
We use Workday Adaptive Planning mostly for our monthly and annual P/L planning. Recently, we started using model sheets for Capex cash …
Overview
What is Workday Adaptive Planning?
Workday Adaptive Planning(formerly Adaptive Insights) is a financial planning and reporting tool. It includes automated budgeting and forecasting, financial reporting, and other active planning capabilities, including integrations with third-party products like Salesforce.
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Popular Features
- Financial budgeting (171)9.090%
- Forecasting (166)8.787%
- Long-term financial planning (160)8.585%
- Management reporting (171)8.383%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
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What is Workday Adaptive Planning?
Workday Adaptive Planning(formerly Adaptive Insights) is a financial planning and reporting tool. It includes automated budgeting and forecasting, financial reporting, and other active planning capabilities, including integrations with third-party products like Salesforce.
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Product Details
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What is Workday Adaptive Planning?
Everybody plans, and strategic planning is a crucial process for every business. This business planning software enables teams to create budgets, forecasts, and models in less time and with greater accuracy, so that the team can focus on analysis and strategy. Having up to date, reliable data, teams can focus on the story behind the numbers, and can improve business decisions and collaboration. Additionally, Workday Adaptive Planning and Consolidation delivers a unified solution that enables Accounting and Finance to accelerate the close, increase planning agility and drive faster, more informed decisions. The software was ranked a leader in Gartner's Cloud Planning and Analysis quadrant.
Workday Adaptive Planning Features
Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting Features
- Supported: Long-term financial planning
- Supported: Financial budgeting
- Supported: Forecasting
- Supported: Scenario modeling
- Supported: Management reporting
Consolidation and Close Features
- Supported: Financial data consolidation
- Supported: Journal entries and reports
- Supported: Multi-currency management
- Supported: Intercompany Eliminations
- Supported: Minority Ownership
- Supported: Local and consolidated reporting
- Supported: Detailed Audit Trails
Financial Reporting and Compliance Features
- Supported: Financial Statement Reporting
- Supported: Management Reporting
- Supported: Excel-based Reporting
- Supported: Automated board and financial reporting
- Supported: XBRL support for regulatory filing
Analytics and Reporting Features
- Supported: Personalized dashboards
- Supported: Color-coded scorecards
- Supported: KPIs
- Supported: Cost and profitability analysis
- Supported: Key Performance Indicator setting
- Supported: Benchmarking with external data
Integration Features
- Supported: Flat file integration
- Supported: Excel data integration
- Supported: Direct links to 3rd-party data sources
Workday Adaptive Planning Screenshots
Workday Adaptive Planning Integrations
Workday Adaptive Planning Competitors
Workday Adaptive Planning Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | Apple iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Mobile Web |
| Supported Countries | United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and many more! |
| Supported Languages | English, Spanish, French, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Polish, Dutch |
Frequently Asked Questions
Workday Adaptive Planning(formerly Adaptive Insights) is a financial planning and reporting tool. It includes automated budgeting and forecasting, financial reporting, and other active planning capabilities, including integrations with third-party products like Salesforce.
Reviewers rate Financial budgeting highest, with a score of 9.
The most common users of Workday Adaptive Planning are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
Workday Adaptive Planning Customer Size Distribution
| Consumers | 0% |
|---|---|
| Small Businesses (1-50 employees) | 0% |
| Mid-Size Companies (51-500 employees) | 60% |
| Enterprises (more than 500 employees) | 40% |
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(337)Attribute Ratings
- 7.7Likelihood to Renew
- 7.3Availability
- 9.1Performance
- 9Usability
- 8.1Support Rating
- 7.3Online Training
- 8.2In-Person Training
- 9.4Implementation Rating
- 8.2Configurability
- 8.6Product Scalability
- 8.2Ease of integration
- 6.4Vendor pre-sale
- 8.2Vendor post-sale
- 7.6Data Sources
- 7.5Data Sharing and Collaboration
- 8.2Professional Services
- 7.3Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Reviews
(101-125 of 203)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
March 20, 2018
Adaptive Insights for Revenue Forecasting
We use Adaptive Insights primarily for our revenue and operations planning.
- Adaptive Insights makes it easy for multiple users to work on their forecast at the same time. In the past, we had each sales manager submit their monthly forecast via Excel and then all the files needed to be consolidated. This is no longer needed with Adaptive Insights.
- Adaptive Insights allows for real-time sales forecast updates.
- When we originally implemented Adaptive Insights, the system was very slow and almost unusable. After working with Adaptive Insights we were able to get the issue resolved. Moral of the story is to be careful how you implement the system.
March 20, 2018
Adaptive Insight offers reporting flexibility
It's currently used by finance department for reporting purposes. Adaptive captures the data in multiple accounts and dimensions. It provides transparency in presenting the actuals/budget/forecast figures to the relevant business unit. It enables the user to identify an anomaly and drill down to the lower level dimension to investigate the root cause. It is also being used as a budget and forecasting tool with several versions across all business unit cost centres.
- Adaptive is easy to use. It enables direct manual input to the spreadsheet and also direct file upload for bulk input. It also has multiple accounts, version, level, and dimensions which give more flexibility to the user in customizing the reporting layout. It adapts to the current business needs which requires multiple various lookout angle of to the data presentation.
- There are various online trainings provided to get an insight and knowledge on how Adaptive works, and the support team has also been very helpful. They are always ready and attend to my query for all of the problems which I encountered in using Adaptive.
- I use Office Connect for Excel and it has performed tremendously well. Once the formula is set up in the Excel file which is linked to Adaptive, I am able to just do a quick change to the criteria and refresh my monthly reporting file, and the file is ready! As simple as that. It saves me a great deal of time and enables me to perform my reporting process efficiently.
- There are many things that can be improved in cube sheet. Here and below are the examples : There is no tools to direct upload accounts GL data to cube sheet. It's currently available for standard sheet but not for cube sheet an it has to be created manually one by one.
- The numbers in cube sheet cannot be linked to standard sheet by formula or vice versa.
- Currently there's no connection between office connect and adaptive website report. Love to see any improvement in this area for example : office connect file can be saved as a one of the report in Adaptive website and vice versa. It's stand alone at the moment and there's no flexibility around it as the user have to stick either way in office connect or Adaptive website report once they create it.
March 20, 2018
Adaptive Insights - a real gem!
Adaptive Insights (AI) is being used for budgeting and forecasting and for financial reporting. It is used across the organization. The budgeting/forecasting solution is used primarily by the treasury team and the financial reporting solution is used by the accounting team, however, all departments are encouraged to use AI to view current expectations and to see budget and actual details.
- Provides boundary controls on the budget process to avoid formula errors experienced in Excel
- Has audit trail to track who made which input
- Provides significant history (currently 6 years) with fast processing time.
- Has flexible reporting capabilities.
- The time filter can't be set as a default so when you navigate through various sheets looking at one particular period you often have to adjust the time filter from the one previous used on any given sheet.
- GL account order can not be easily modified (e.g. to get to numerical order after adding a new account) and in some cases is impossible.
- Training can be expensive.
March 20, 2018
Adaptive for all analysts
We use Adaptive as out primary forecasting tool for all SG&A. We are currently implementing Revenue and COGS.
- Adaptive has great, knowledgeable and responsive support consultants.
- Adaptive along with the report tool OfficeConnect is very user-friendly and allows you to forecast and report easily.
- Our company has constant GL/Dept/Product structure changes but making those adjustments in Adaptive is easy.
- Being able to have a consolidated view of all split level detail regardless department or account.
- Automatic GL/Department/Product structure updates from Oracle.
- Giving the businesses the ability to model scenarios without having an admin to create a separate version.
March 19, 2018
Adaptive for Planning & Reporting
Adaptive Insights is being used by the finance department primarily for planning. We also use Office Connect for reporting. It simplifies the planning process and also gives us quick, push-button reports.
- You are able to make changes in the expense plan based on headcount, organization, location. All changes flow nicely and are updated based on hiring plan.
- Any changes made to income statement flow through to balance sheet and cash flows. Makes planning easier because you are able to test versions and quickly see the output.
- Office Connect is a great way to get push button reports with identical format.
- I would love to be able to open more than one Office Connect document at a time.
- There are many features similar to excel, but are missing some features. For example, I'd like to be able to select a group and delete, or select a group to copy/paste.
March 18, 2018
Basic Review
Every department in the organization uses Adaptive Insights. Most of the users do budgeting and reviewing of actuals in Adaptive. It allows us to transmit the financials to each specific person without having to send individualized monthly reports.
- Reporting
- Budgeting
- I think learning how to build the reports is the drawback. I currently don't do that for myself.
March 16, 2018
Adaptive is a game changer!
Currently, I am using Adaptive Insights for our budgeting, forecasting, and variance reporting. I am working with my Adaptive support team to also begin using Adaptive for scenario planning. The reports are being used across our entire organization.
- Adaptive is great at building a budget model, and providing reports around that model.
- Adaptive allows me to build our budget in various currencies for our global entities.
- Adaptive is great at allowing me to take a scenario, or version of our budget, and then tweaking it as we consider various business decisions, to determine the financial impact.
- I think Adaptive has room for improvement regarding the ability to use various sheets from an updated version - I'd like to be able to take a sheet that I've updated - say the Personnel sheet - and then have that information integrated back into a previous version. Hard to explain - and it may be something that I can already do but just haven't figured it out yet.
- I'd like to have more formatting options with the Discovery tools.
March 16, 2018
Highly recommend Adaptive Insights
It's used across the whole organisation. It's mainly used as a consolidation tool whereby our 5 operating countries (and head office in London) enter summaries from their Trial Balances, and then it is consolidated here in London. We also make limited use of the planning tools for Budgeting or Forecasts- though this is only to a limited extent.
- It's relatively simple to learn to use- I've used skype to teach people in our organisation how to use
- It has a decent interface with excel to download information. While it isn't as intuitive as Essbase, it's still reasonably easy to learn and better than other products
- It's in the cloud so it's easy to roll out to new countries
- I'd love an ability to easily save previous versions e.g. after a budget submission on (say) 12th August, I'd like to be able to freeze that version so that when resubmissions are made, I could compare to the original 12th August version. While this is theoretically possible, it's quite time consuming to set up a second version e.g. Budget v2
- The data upload seems a bit clunky at times- not as intuitive as it could be. It would be nice to be able to quickly press a button and it would download into Excel all the inputs that are needed, then fill them in, and click another button to upload them. At present, if we add a new line in our accounts its a bit time-consuming to add it to the upload sheet
- I'd prefer to have the option to show the Actuals versus Budget in separate section e.g. show actuals Jan to December then show Budget Jan to December- it currently shows them together Jan actuals with Jan Budget, then Febt actuals with Feb Budget and so on...
- Also, i'd like to be able to have variance columns comparing the two i.e. difference between actuals and budget
March 16, 2018
Adaptive for the entire organization and SPEED
We use Adaptive across the whole organization. We use it for budgeting including sales forecasting, expenses, sales commissions calculations, capital expenditure planning and various budget reporting. We also use it for our financial reporting system throughout the organization. We are starting to build out dashboard and kpi metrics.
- We like the flexibility of reporting and being able to drill into the detail and both a customer/item level for sales and account level for expenses. It gives much more information available to the user in a single sign on.
- The budget process is very nice. You have the ability to roll over budgets from year to year and make modifications to them. You can go back to a previous version and see exactly how things were budgeted. You have the ability to see prior year actuals by account when budgeting for the next year.
- We are starting to use Adaptive for a rolling forcast/projection tool as well by using a second version of the budget and making that more adaptable to how things are performing throughout the year as well as what is still to come.
- We wish some of the dashboard reporting had some more options in terms of formatting to better show actuals vs. budget or prior year in the charts. There are a lot of color options but not as much in terms of lines or other markings.
- You can drill into the account detail to see the transactions for the monthly information but you cannot not drill into the account detail for the year-to-date columns. This would be a useful feature to have available.
March 15, 2018
Adapting to the constantly changing start-up's needs
We use Adaptive Insights across all departments for budgeting purposes. On a monthly and sometimes daily basis, we use Adaptive for reporting purposes within our department, across other departments, and for external reporting purposes. We also use Adaptive within our department for forecasting. Adaptive allows us to make changes and communicate results of those changes quickly to employees, board members and investors.
- Adaptive allows for more detailed budgeting.
- Adaptive allows managers to have more control over and take ownership of their budgets.
- Adaptive integrates fairly easily to most ERP and CRM systems.
- Through integration and the use of Office Connect, monthly and ad hoc reporting is quick and almost painless.
- Users need more visibility for external reporting. If this already exists, then I would suggest more training or webcasts that cover this topic.
- On the sales side of things, I would suggest ensuring that your NEW users are aware of the amount of training involved in learning to be an ADMIN for Adaptive Insights. Users need to be able to move beyond the implementation to active use. Yes, Adaptive makes things easy, but only if you know how to write the formulas and set things up correctly to run in the background. Hands-on training is a must! Our implementation was 3 years ago, though, so maybe things have improved somewhat since then.
- More problem/solution-specific forums for users to interact with each other and find new and better ways of handling unique issues. Since Adaptive is so flexible, it often takes bouncing ideas off others to figure out the best way to plan for certain types of revenue or expenses.
March 15, 2018
Adaptive for non-profits
We're using it across the entire organization, currently for budgeting, but eventually for forecasting, reporting, etc.
- There's a lot of flexibility in how you implement the tool.
- It saves time on areas like allocations and other re-calculations as things change in your planning process.
- After implementation, it can be challenging to understand all of the design elements.
- Every once in a while you'll come across a place where you'll say "boy, that doesn't work the way I would have hoped", but Adaptive is always making improvements.
March 14, 2018
Good budgeting/ forecasting tool
My company uses Adaptive Insights for budgeting. It's used across the organization by all department managers.
- Adaptive Insights is very user friendly even for people who don't regularly use Excel. It has Excel type functionality; however, it's simpler and more intuitive in use. All our managers have access to their departments, and are overall happy with the program.
- Adaptive Insights provides good and simple security settings. We have set a secure one-click sign in into the system. Also, it's easy to give security/permission to department managers based on their roles and information that they need to see.
- The company provides regular updates.
- There is an Adaptive Insights version of Excel connection to the system (Office Connect) that we use for reporting, which is helpful in building complex and multi-dimensional reports.
- We would like to be able to finish a budget and make it 'static,' which is currently impossible in Adaptive. In the budget, there are formulas that run off the actual imported data. So if updated data is imported, the budget changes. It would be helpful to create a static copy and then compare it to the various scenarios when importing the new data.
March 14, 2018
Happy repeat Adaptive Insights customer
Adaptive Insights is being used by our organization as the source of financial truth for FP&A. We constructed our budget in Adaptive Insights, are using it for rolling forecasts, and are using it as the source system for investor and management financial reporting.
- The system interface is quite easy to use for financially-oriented employees.
- The versioning tools are excellent and minimize confusion as we roll through versions of the budget and forecast.
- The reporting tools are flexible and clear.
- Working with businesses using data sets of many dimensions and high cardinality can be difficult - our organization had to shoehorn multiple dimensions in by using some system hacks which were less than optimal.
- While reporting is flexible, the in-environment reporting tool has limited formatting capabilities. It would be nice for it to look more polished.
- Office Connect, the tool to import data into Office documents, can be a bit tetchy and not always update particularly well.
January 30, 2018
Adaptive Admin Review
Titan International, Inc. primarily uses the Adaptive Planning module to consolidate Actuals and Planning versions into a single source environment. Titan also gathers metric data, detailed sales information, and capital spending projects through various inputs and data loads. With the data housed in Adaptive, Titan has the ability to populate various monthly/quarterly reports, packs, and presentations using a single tool. Titan has 50+ locations around the world and every location uses Adaptive Planning.
One of Titan's weakest areas is technology (multiple outdated ERP systems). As Titan is currently implementing a worldwide Cloud ERP system, Adaptive has functioned as the "glue" for data gathering and collaboration (instead of Microsoft Excel).
- Very reliable cloud solution as there is hardly any down time. Less stress knowing that colleagues around the world have the ability perform their duties without the hassle of errors, waiting times, etc.
- Certain areas look and feel like Microsoft Excel. Seamlessly copy from Excel and paste into Adaptive. This helps people adopt Adaptive quicker.
- Adaptive's administration, customization and formula writing can be very powerful even without the need of an IT professional. This greatly reduces setup time of building models, input sheets, etc.
- Adaptive's support team is very efficient and resourceful. It's nice not having to wait for an answer.
- If a company is involved with multiple currencies in Adaptive, expect to use workarounds for weighted average exchange rates. Ex. YTD Income on the balance sheet.
- The workaround was not difficult but this seems to be a missing functionality.
- Adaptive's Excel add-in called OfficeConnect should function more like Oracle Essbase with drill downs and expansion.
- Some limitations on Adaptive's dashboarding tool called Discovery. Ex. Viewing Year over Year without the need of a workaround.
January 26, 2018
Peace of mind for your reporting and FP&A process
We are using Adaptive Suite across the entire company. We have a very complex structure with over 100 P&Ls. Adaptive allows for transparency and the flow of data. We use Adaptive for forecasting, budgeting, analysis, and reporting.
- Everything is one place
- Easy interaction between users across the country / organization using life data
- No downtime during update and maintenance.
- Ease of interfacing with other databases
- User roles and responsibilities for personnel only
January 19, 2018
Highly Recommend Adaptive.
We use it as our main budget/forecasting model within the FP&A team and executives have read-only access to pull up monthly financial results for their respective departments. It helps us more reliably budget and forecast, eliminating the need for a large Excel model, which is prone to user error and can get difficult to maintain as it gets bigger and more robust. It also allows us to perform quick forecast changes or sensitivity analysis, usually only requiring a change in an assumption or input. This becomes very useful during quarter end reporting where changes are required at the last minute.
- Very customizable. You can set up your financial model any way you'd like based on what works best for your company. Set up is also easy to get a handle on. We had hands-on training for 3 days and were able to start building out our models on our own with minimal help afterward.
- Reports and dashboards are extremely easy to use and build on your own. Recent updates to the dashboard/discovery pack allow users to easily drag and drop items to build interactive dashboards that execs find easy to understand.
- Extremely easy to maintain the model. Once you have set up your model, its very easy to manage on an ongoing basis, leaving more time for analysis rather than administrative work.
- When we purchased the software, there was no template model for SaaS companies. Given Adaptive itself is a SaaS company, we had hoped that we would receive a template that would have saved us some time upfront in building our models. And we probably would have to build some out differently. But I understand this may be an option for new customers.
- Some basic functionality like YTD calculations are not built into the formula functionality. You have to manually build this into the formula yourself. But it is an easy fix. It just would be nice to have that, as most companies would be interested in a YTD calc.
- Being able to format reports/dashboards a bit better with +/- variance differentiators
January 18, 2018
Great tool
[It's] Used by entire finance department as well as operational management. It addresses the problem of analysing data across our multiple legal entities, enabling us to gain insights and view data across a variety of different contexts.
- Ability to create on-the-fly reports, and easily change the way the report presents
- Compare period-to-period and version-to-version results
- Automation of input of actual financial data, as well as key non-financial indicators
- When large amounts of data are loaded, the system tends to slow down as there are so many re-calculations required for each line of data
January 17, 2018
Adaptive Insights is a great user experience
DCC uses Adaptive Insights for planning and budget across 40 business units. Those 40 business units are geographically dispersed across Canada. Adaptive Insights has allowed us to transform our planning and budgeting from an Excel model that required a lot of maintenance to an easy to use format user have adoption easily. It has also shortened the time it takes to do monthly financial reporting. The additional benefit is the dashboard capability that we didn't have before.
- Easy to use and implement.
- The organizational hierarchy makes it easy to roll up business units into regions and the company as a whole.
- It has made the reporting function easier at month end.
- The processes set up need to be able to assign multiple users to each task. The way it works, the tasks are assigned to each individual user.
- The workflow for lower levels in the hierarchy could be enhanced to make it easier to find for users.
- For managing reports, it would be nice to be able to drag and drop them between folders.
Our organization uses Adaptive Suite across the whole organization, for budgeting and forecasting, as well as reporting. We have created a full P&L and balance sheet, and detailed revenue and expense models for planning. Our company also uses Office Connect as well as Discovery and Adaptive Integration.
Adaptive Planning allows our organization to plan a full, detailed, bottoms up budget once a year and easily make updates during quarterly forecasting. We are able to quickly view our key metrics and trends and make decisions faster and more accurately. Multiple users are able to access the system at one time and tight SOX controls allow us the flexibility in setting up security access.
Adaptive Planning allows our organization to plan a full, detailed, bottoms up budget once a year and easily make updates during quarterly forecasting. We are able to quickly view our key metrics and trends and make decisions faster and more accurately. Multiple users are able to access the system at one time and tight SOX controls allow us the flexibility in setting up security access.
- Adaptive is easy to use. As a finance professional, I do not want to build reports using SQL or other data mining methods. The easy 'drag and drop' is very intuitive and fast that I can get the data I need, by myself, in minutes.
- Adaptive Planning is very flexible. I am able to bring many types of models into my instance and use complex formulas to retrieve and calculate data.
- Adaptive is intuitive for first time users. We have a variety of users with limited knowledge of Finance and I believe that they are able to understand and use the system with little formal training.
- The Discovery module has had many enhancements recently and is improving all of the time, however I do think there is still room to grow. Some of the 'basic' types of charts take a bit of time to design in the way I want to view them. Some of the defaults are not as flexible as I would desire.
- I would like access to more training, on a more regular basis. A lot of the user training is offered only a few times per year in person.
Adaptive is being used across the whole organization for our planning and forecasting processes. We have over 40 users that actively use the system and engage in the planning process. The immediate consolidation of planning input into reports and seeing the results is the biggest benefit that the organization receives from using Adaptive. From a finance perspective, the ease of modeling, scenario and version control, and ad hoc analysis are big benefits.
- "Excel" type modeling - the formula logic, navigation, look and feel are very much like Excel. Additionally, the ease-of-use is enhanced by features like automatically copying across or down through cells with similar numbers or formulas that are repetitive. Single-click actions in general, are great.
- Integrity - unlike Excel, there is a much lower risk of unintended, accidental "fat-fingering". The confirmation requests when switching between pages/sheets to ensure changes are not lost are a huge benefit.
- Scenario modeling by simply copying existing models is priceless. It allows for looking at different outcomes based on different decision points. Additionally, you can look at side-by-side comparisons in a single model by comparing versions.
- OfficeConnect: Ability to open multiple files in the same instance
- Adaptive Planning: one-click expand and collapse of parent/child groupings in rows
- Adaptive Reports are not the easiest to format. Lack intuitive formatting, and clean results.
November 14, 2017
Adaptive Insights: Better Budgeting, Better Reporting
Our organization uses Adaptive Insights across multiple locations and departments. We use it for planning (budgeting) purposes and helps us to eliminate formula and other errors prone to spreadsheet use.
- Adaptive has excellent, quick, and free customer service support for customers.
- Adaptive Model Management allows Finance Administrators to quickly updated organizational structure or restructure and the changes are effective instantaneously.
- Adaptive's Engineering team was able to quickly and accurately design and executive requested implementation parameters for data extraction from our source system, which allows each user to view budget to actual results in Adaptive Reporting.
- Adaptive continuously improves its products and solicits customer input. Throughout the year, they allow customers to vote on desired improvements/enhancements and the selected improvement/enhancement is released within the year.
- Formulas are based on proprietary language syntax. With the help of built-in formula assistance, an Administrator or User can develop formulas. However, the syntax appears complicated.
- Pricing can become cost-prohibitive for 100+ user logins.
- Currently, Adaptive sends email blasts to communicate product improvements or new releases. With increased email spam, this results in lost or deleted email communication. Quarterly or Monthly local seminars providing continuing education would be helpful for customers to remain apprised of product improvements while also allowing learning opportunities for certified and un-certified professionals.
November 14, 2017
Adaptive reveiw - Infoblox
We use Adaptive Insights for our whole company budgeting / spend and headcount management as well as our P&L roll up and reporting.
- Labor cost forecasting.
- Comparison of actual to forecast and variance analysis.
- User friendly, we have many non-finance users that input and track their spending with limited finance support.
- Cannot open more than one Office Connect file at a time, this is very frustrating. Have been told this is going to be fixed but it has not.
November 14, 2017
Adaptive Review
Adaptive is used across the entire organization. We use it for budgeting forecasting, reporting and grant planning.
- Easy to roll-up financials for every level of the organization - makes consolidating, planning and reporting faster and easier to produce.
- Drill-down capabilities in sheets and in reports allows non-finance users to review and verify GL detail.
- Familiar, easy-to-use functionality and navigation for non-fiance users.
- We scrapped Discovery (dashboarding) a few years ago because it was not as customizable as we had hoped and a bit hard to use and navigate. I hear however that there have been significant updates since.
November 13, 2017
You would be foolish not to use a product like this.
Adaptive is used across the entire organization for budgeting and forecasting purposes. Yearly budget and rolling forecasts with budget to actual reporting on a monthly basis.
- Customer support is top notch, questions are answered quickly. Pushing important updates to customer on a regular basis that make using the product easier and ensure we are aware of changes in the program.
- Obviously the ease of using the product and time savings from using a budgeting program.
- The ability to run scenarios and update forecasts. It takes a minute to start up a new scenario to run comparisons against. I have been in a board meeting and have flipped my screen to a live scenario and updated on the fly as discussions progressed. Instant information instead of waiting to see how changes would affect the company.
- I wouldn't say the program is the easiest to use. It takes time to understand the concepts of how to format. That being said, I setup our instance with limited assistance from Adaptive.
- The online help was weak although it is improving with more video training.
November 10, 2017
Adaptive Suite - check it out!
We use Adaptive Suite as our primary budgeting and forecasting tool. The Suite is managed by the Finance team but the business owners have access to view reports, and update their budgets and forecasts. We were using Excel spreadsheets prior to implementing the tool, and we found that the spreadsheets were not scalable, were prone to errors, and it was difficult to build the sophistication that we needed in our forecasting. We are in high-growth mode and needed more agility with our planning.
- Adaptive Suite makes it easy to see the impact of a single change through out all financial statements. For example, if a sales rep leaves, adding the end date to the Personnel sheet will not only affect the personnel cost, but will also flow through to sales bookings, revenue projections, A/R, etc.
- Adaptive Suite allows business owners and the executives to access reports, dashboards, and details of their actuals and budgets in a self-service manner. The tool is fairly easy to utilize, and being the cloud means that the end users don't have to wait for the admins to refresh the data tables or system. This allows for better utilization of the finance team on value-add activities, while providing more transparency to the business owners.
- The building and maintenance of the model does not need highly specialized coding skills or IT help. Formula syntax is closely aligned to Excel, accounts are easy to set up and customize, and the flexibility of the model allows for company-specific requirements to be met. The recent releases have also included more flexibility with time, allowing for planning in unique time groupings (semesters, trimesters, by week, and other unique time divisions).
- Users can add notes directly in the tool, eliminating the need for email chains or sharing Excel files. The Finance team can indicate areas of concern and business owners can respond, with all comments in the tool. This keeps all history and context in one place so it can be referred to later.
- It would be really useful to have better help documents for formulas. While the syntax is close to Excel, there are differences and the help documents are not as easy to navigate or as comprehensive as you might find in Excel.
- There needs to be more flexibility for security in the Dashboard module. Right now, security in Dashboards follows the security set up for viewing the data sheets. While this is usually fine, there are executive dashboards that need to allow all executives to view total company metrics, even though they should not see the data sheets of their colleagues departments.
- It would be great to have a way to make a true "static" version, almost like copy-paste values. Some formulas can be determined by version, but other formulas will apply to the entire instance and so changes to that formula will change all of the versions, even locked versions. When the budget has been approved, those values need to stay static, even if a formula has to be changed later in the year.