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Workday Adaptive Planning

Workday Adaptive Planning

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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Recent Reviews
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 45 features
  • Financial budgeting (171)
    9.0
    90%
  • Forecasting (166)
    8.7
    87%
  • Long-term financial planning (160)
    8.5
    85%
  • Management reporting (171)
    8.3
    83%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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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.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • Setup fee optional
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://forms.workday.com/en…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Alternatives Pricing

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Kepion is a cloud planning & analytics software company that connects all organizations' teams under a single view of their business performance. We enable more intelligent decisions to be made by companies about their financial and operational future. Kepion global offices and partners deliver…

What is PlanGuru?

PlanGuru is budgeting, forecasting and financial analytics software for SMB's, Nonprofits and the Accountants/ Advisors that work with them.

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Features

BI Standard Reporting

Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.

9.3
Avg 8.0

Ad-hoc Reporting

Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.

8
Avg 8.3

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

8
Avg 8.2

Data Discovery and Visualization

Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.

7.7
Avg 7.6

Access Control and Security

Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.

9
Avg 8.7

Mobile Capabilities

Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

8.5
Avg 8.0

Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting

These activities are designed to assist with both data-driven operational, short-term planning and strategic long term planning

8.7
Avg 8.3

Consolidation and Close

Consolidation of data from multiple entities with currency management, reporting and audit trails.

7.6
Avg 8.0

Financial Reporting and Compliance

Financial statements and regulatory filings

8.5
Avg 8.2

Analytics and Reporting

Dashboards and scorecards for KPI monitoring and benchmarking

7.7
Avg 8.0

Integration

Ability to integrate with external applications.

8.3
Avg 8.3
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Product Details

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

Screenshot of Adaptive Planning balance sheets.Screenshot of Adaptive Discovery visuals.Screenshot of Adaptive Planning expense variance analysis report.Screenshot of Adaptive Discovery visuals with drill-down capabilities.Screenshot of Adaptive Planning in-sheet visualizations (waterfall chart)Screenshot of Sparklines are used to visualize trends and make adjustments visuallyScreenshot of Built-in audit trail and cell explorer will show the source and history of any metric, assumption or formula

Workday Adaptive Planning Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationApple iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Mobile Web
Supported CountriesUnited States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and many more!
Supported LanguagesEnglish, 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.

Anaplan, OneStream, and Planful are common alternatives for Workday Adaptive Planning.

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

Consumers0%
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)0%
Mid-Size Companies (51-500 employees)60%
Enterprises (more than 500 employees)40%
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(337)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(126-150 of 203)
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November 10, 2017

Adaptive Suite Review

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We currently limit the use of Adaptive to the finance team and it's being used strictly for budgeting and forecasting purposes. The scope of our original implementation has expanded greatly which caused us to perform a rebuild of the solution approximately 1 year ago.
  • Projecting Revenue and Direct costs - ease of uploading drivers (units, Selling prices, Direct Cost elements) to derive these values.
  • Projecting Personnel related OPEX costs - the complexity associated with payroll forecasting has been a challenge based on the parameters which our payroll I set up. There are several premium and bonus eligibility factors that had to be incorporated into the logic in order that the results fairly represented what was actually being paid.
  • Drill-down functionality seems to be cumbersome. if you don't clearly understand where the under-lying details are being derived (sales module, personnel sheet, etc) getting to those details from the main reporting screens has been difficult.
Based on our experience, it would seem that the solution is very user-friendly if you're working at a rolled-up or high level. The solution is capable of being granular and providing reports at that level if its been properly set up. Modifying the complexity from a high level perspective to a detailed perspective created some challenges that caused us to reconsider how we were going to use the solution.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Adaptive Suite is used by our Finance team as well as our external Accounting team. We primarily use Adaptive to model and plan. It is very helpful to have a central place where we can pull the latest financials, in various scenarios. It helps us budget and to keep track of how the company is performing.
  • The ability to create different scenarios.
  • The ability to export the files.
  • OfficeConnect is a useful way to pull the financials.
  • Drilling down on specific lines/cells.
  • OfficeConnect can be a little confusing for new users sometimes.
Adaptive is best whenever we need see financial statements -- we can easily scroll through and find the departments/scenarios that we are looking for.

Adaptive is less appropriate whenever we try to drill down to see why certain line items are high or low (for example, our "Online Software/Services" line item aggregates all our vendors into one total cost and it makes it difficult to identify the drivers right away).
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Adaptive Insights for planning and reporting. Department users around the globe use the system for planning and then for reports.
  • Looks and feels like Excel, so easy for users to adapt.
  • Allows for many levels of the organization globally.
  • Provides data in a matrix organization.
  • We have a few challenges with how the level work. It is not always intuitive.
  • It would be beneficial if we could report different time frames. One for management reporting and one for statutory reporting.
  • It would be great if we could use the same base data and report one way as sales revenue and another as amortized revenue.
It rolls up budget data instantaneously and does allocations as data is updated.
Nicholas Amoroso, CPA MBA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Adaptive for all of our budgeting and quarterly forecasting across the entire company. In addition we use it for all of our monthly financial reporting at the senior leadership and department levels. It has solved the problem of consolidating spreadsheet files every time we do the annual budget or a new forecast, cutting out errors and greatly simplifying the process in general.
  • Setting up new departments or changing a reporting hierarchy
  • Creating new reports, whether at a high level or detailed view
  • Creating a new budget or forecast version
  • Creating formulas within a report or in sheets can be challenging
  • Adding more icons and/or the copy/past function to help eliminate some of the repetitiveness when creating new reports
Very well suited for small to medium sized organizations where you want department heads to have an important role in creating their budgets or updating forecasts.
Jimmy Roybal | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Adaptive Suite for all of our budgeting, forecasting, and reporting needs. All business unit owners have access to both Adaptive Planning and Discovery. This product addresses all of our planning, BOD reporting and IR decks as well.
  • Allows real time what-if scenarios
  • Great for preparing financial decks via PowerPoint / Office Connect
  • Provides detailed budgets to allow business unit owners to build itemized budgets
  • Excel Add on for Planning still needs improvement. Very slow and cumbersome.
  • Discovery (dashboard reporting) has improved over the years but still needs to allow more flexibility with reporting and the data attributes that you can use to build out dashboards.
  • Needs more ways to provide end user access so that you can add more security around what each person can see.
I think the Office Connect add on with Adaptive Suite is the best way to leverage Adaptive Suite, and allows end users (finance) to still have flexibility with Excel. If you are a small company with only one person building a budget then I wouldn't recommend Adaptive until you're ready to increase your user group.
Jennifer Summitt | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Adaptive Planning to forecast personnel, capital, and operating expenses. We use a product by Adaptive called OfficeConnect as our primary reporting tool in FP&A. We import actuals data from our Oracle GL into Adaptive on a daily basis (or more frequently as needed) and we produce P&L reports for our management team that contain historical results and projections. The software is used by approximately 50 people at my company.
  • It's very easy to import financial data from Oracle. We import values and transaction-level details. The import (called a connector) runs every morning but we can run it on demand. The import only takes about 10 minutes to complete.
  • Adaptive launched a new reporting tool called OfficeConnect a couple of years ago. We use OfficeConnect Excel and OfficeConnect Powerpoint for nearly all of our reporting. It's very easy to build and maintain reports in this tool. Additionally, updating the Board Book each quarter can be accomplished very quickly since most of the content for the presentation is linked to Adaptive OfficeConnect excel reports.
  • It's easy to train new users on how to use Adaptive Planning. The input sheets look like an excel file and it's fairly intuitive to use. Our users enjoy being able to use one tool to access historical and forward looking data and to run their own reports. They don't need to access Oracle to conduct research since it's all available in Adaptive.
  • Adaptive frequently releases software updates. I would like to see the company offer improved training on new features. Even though Adaptive holds a webinar following each release, it's very fast-paced and high-level and I don't learn much about the new functionality. It would be helpful if Adaptive could hold several webinars when rolling out updates, with each one focusing on just one of their products so that they could do a deeper dive on the enhancements.
  • While I very much enjoy the reporting enhancements offered with OfficeConnect, it's very easy for your spreadsheet to go sideways, meaning your rows suddenly become misaligned and the report becomes unusable. When this happens, it would be nice if the 'undo' option actually worked, but it generally doesn't. More often than not, it's faster to re-create a report from scratch rather than to try to repair a broken spreadsheet.
  • When working in Excel OfficeConnect, it's very frustrating to only have one spreadsheet open at a time. This isn't how most users utilize Excel. I would like the ability to work on multiple files simultaneously.
Adaptive is very robust for expense planning. We have a lot of formulas and our personnel planning model is complex. There's an easy to use allocation model within Adaptive Insights that helps us manage our corporate allocations efficiently. We don't currently use Adaptive to forecast revenue, sales commissions or cash flow, so I am unable to comment on how adept the software is with these calculations.
Bryan Schmidt | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Adaptive is used by all budget managers across UNITE HERE HEALTH. One budget system for all entities and all managers. Before Adaptive, I personally used 185 spreadsheets and 400 workbooks. Adaptive has allowed for greater flexibility and integrity within the budget system. I now use about 10 spreadsheets which are linked and automatically updated with Adaptive using Office Connect.
  • Single Source of Truth. I no longer have have multiple versions of excel with multiple answers to the same question.
  • Speed. Before Adaptive, one change might take me 2-3 hours to update my excel spreadsheets. Now, that same change takes less than 5 minutes and updates all my schedules.
  • Transparency. I now can see progress with the budget on process tracker or reviewing their spreadsheets. Before Adaptive, I did not know budget progress until spreadsheets were emailed to me.
  • Dashboards. Adaptive has dashboards to hopefully answer Executive questions on the budget before these questions are asked.
  • Cloud based. Adaptive is accessible anywhere internet access is available. IT also does not need to support this product.
  • Upgrades. Well announced in advance and done on weekends. No down time with the system.
  • Reporting. I need to save the reports into my personal folder, and then transfer to the new budget folder. I then need to update the time periods for the new budget season.
  • Required fields. Managers many times think they are done, but didn't complete information. Hard to always identify missing information. Better if I could label columns or fields as required and could report on fields not completed.
Methodical approach to budgeting. Every manager uses the same spreadsheets and completes the same forms and updated automatically. All information can be exported to Excel and automatically updated using Office Connect.

Adaptive could be better at maintenance. Needs to update all the reports for time differences. Would like Adaptive to require certain fields to be completed. Would like exception reporting if certain fields were not completed.
Justin Wade | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Adaptive in the Finance and Accounting Department. It's primary use use is to produce a monthly rolling forecast. We also use it for annual budget creation, actual vs. budget/forecast reporting, what-if scenarios, and resource planning. Based on it's success in Finance, we are considering rolling this out to other department leads for budgeting and resource planning.
  • Adaptive is the best tool I have used to maintain an up-to-date live forecast. As soon as I hear of a change in staffing or spending patterns I make the adjustment in one place and Adaptive feeds it through to every report and forecast that pulls that information.
  • Adaptive saves countless hours in resource planning. When making a decision to hire new staff it is easy to see the short and long term effect on the forecast and adjust on the fly as needed.
  • Being able to create multiple versions of the budget and forecast is crucial when planning. By creating a simple report you can see all variance between the versions with a few clicks of the mouse.
  • There is always room for improvement with speed. Many users are used to Excel which has instant results when you change a formula. Although it is just a couple seconds to refresh, this can deter some users.
  • Having a feature to highlight a cell in a cube or modeled sheet would be helpful. People use this all the time in Excel to draw attention to a particular data point.
Adaptive is an excellent tool for forecasting and resource planning and it integrates smoothly with Excel. I have used it only for financial purposes and haven't encountered anything it can't handle.
Lisa VanHuystee | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Adaptive for Budgeting, Forecasting and Long Range Planning, and Management reporting. It is used extensively across our global organization. I currently have 60 users and approximately 40 are active uses or Adaptive.
  • Allows for each entity or department to work in local currency. Adaptive seamlessly consolidates and converts all data to USD so I have a clear picture of the total company consolidated results at any time
  • Integrated connection with NetSuite to upload actual data in less than 5 minutes. Allowing to do variance reporting, actual vs budget or forecast in a matter of minutes instead of hours or days.
  • Reporting, I can create a set of reports for users to view the financial data. I create one set of reports that are accessed by multiple uses and because of security and filtering on the reports, users can only see the data that is relevant to them and only what they are allowed to see.
  • Easy access via the web, allowing international users as well as traveling executive trouble free access to our model at anytime
  • Fully Customization to our business practices, with little IT support. As a Financial professional I can easily work with the model and adjust formulas or update our model based on the changing needs of our business.
  • Dashboards, fulling integrated dashboard capabilities that are updated as the data real time as the information in the model changes.
  • Adaptive is adding new features and functionality very quickly. There are typically 3 major releases a year. Sometimes when new features are introduced they really do not work as demonstrated in training. Adaptive should do more vetting of new features and making sure enhancements are ready for wide scale use.
  • Loading data from NetSuite for companies with multiple entities. Now when data is loaded its all or nothing. Sometimes there are changes to only 1 or two companies , it would be nice to have an indicator of which company data has changed and have the option to only load changed data.
  • Some additional security features would be helpful, such as being able to allow access to one user if they need to do a quick update to the system, currently this is based on user role rather than individual user.
  • As and Admin, having the ability to have in system broadcast notes to user, such as " Adaptive will close at 5pm PDT today" and users would get the message if they are signed in or the message would pop up when they sign in.
  • Navigating between sheets could be improved, currently this is done via links, but sometimes it a bit bothersome to go between sheets
  • The ability to change the currency view on a sheet. Currently a sheet will default to the local currency of a sheet, but sometimes you might want a quick view of the sheet in USD. This is not possibly you have to run a report to see the USD conversion.
  • Being able to access reports from the dashboard. Dashboards are great for quick analysis but sometimes you have more meaningful data on reports. If you can put a link on the dashboard to reports this would be helpful for users.
Adaptive is well suited for small and medium size organizations. Especially helpful for organizations with a workforce spread across multiple locations and countries. Because of the ease of use of Adaptive and maintenance of the system, very little IT support is necessary. Adaptive is also organized and efficient allowing for lower headcount in Finance to deploy and maintain Adaptive.
October 20, 2017

We love Adaptive!

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Adaptive is used across the whole organization and helps us easily analyze previous performance and model future expenses. Prior to implementing Adaptive, the company was using Excel for budgeting and forecasting - this created issues with version control and consolidation. Using Adaptive has eliminated these issues. Adaptive also makes it easy to manage levels of user access.
  • Adaptive has very user friendly modeling features. It is easy to modify assumptions to adjust calculations for future performance.
  • One of Adaptive's strengths is the ability to easily clone models to test various forecast scenarios.
  • Adaptive interfaces well with Excel. It's very helpful that Adaptive reports can be downloaded into Excel templates.
  • Supporting detail sheets can become cumbersome over time due to empty rows and multiple rows of data due to prior years.
  • For P&L>Display Options>Version Comparison, it would be great if you could compare multiple years - right now you can only compare one year at a time - this is somewhat inconvenient
Adaptive is a superior planning tool for small to medium sized companies. Adaptive is most effective when the model is populated with accurate assumptions. Where Adaptive is less appropriate is complex revenue forecasting. My company currently uses offline models for revenue forecasting due to multiple revenue streams and rapidly changing assumptions.
October 20, 2017

Adaptive works for us.

Mikel Christopherson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Adaptive is used across the entire organization to deliver weekly and monthly operating results. Users include small contract managers up to Division Vice Presidents. Forecasting updates vary by contract but can be as often as monthly; the annual budget process sees heavy use across the 100 users. Our analysts work as a team to review individual contracts each month against budget and KPI's. In monthly meetings, the analysis team and operations meet to review specific results, these meetings use HTML reports in Adaptive to facilitate the reviews. Drill down capabilities in the system allow for answering questions down to the accounts payable voucher descriptions. The Office Connect tool is used each month to produce financial reports for the parent organization, board review committee, and senior management.

In some areas, we used Adaptive to collect operating data that would otherwise require emailing of files into the accounting group. This data collection then is turned into data imports into the ERP system.
  • Bottoms Up budgets are built using flexible models that can be customized at the contract level. Our operating divisions vary in their drivers and KPI, and Adaptive has let us tailor specific sheets to specific requirements. The different models then roll up into the corporate reports and budgets.
  • Adaptive Office Connect has become a valuable tool in producing monthly reports in Word and PowerPoint. We are able to rapidly update reports as budgets and forecasts are modified.
  • Using the multiple versions available in Adaptive has allowed us to create and compare various 'What If' scenarios without losing sight of the differing assumptions.
  • Adaptive has been adopted by many different levels of users who do not need heavy IT or Financial backgrounds. These users, with some basic instruction have been able to gain ownership of the budgets and modify reports as needed.
  • Recent introduction of multiple time periods (e.g. days and weeks) vs. months only is still under review to see if we can properly adopt it to our needs.
  • In the reporting functions, it would be nice to be able to create scheduled reports or trigger specific report delivery.
In an organization where requirements can be vastly different between areas of the company and 'one size fits all' does NOT apply, the system's flexibility is a great asset. Drivers and KPI's can be modified to meet specific needs and yet have the results roll up to a single greater company picture.

Assumptions at company levels can also be driven down to the contract level.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Adaptive across the entire organization to budget to budget for each department. In addition, we utilize the product to provide monthly budget to actual variances to the department heads. It allows all the department heads to access their budgets at anytime without the possibility of them modifying it. In addition, it cuts down on Excel formula busts and keeps a record of all budget revisions.
  • The product is very user friendly for non-accountants.
  • The formulas calculations and roll-ups of departments work very well.
  • The personnel aspects and calculations are something that would take forever to do into Excel.
  • The announcements section is hard to impossible to use.
  • The audit trail function does not identify if someone deleted a line or line split in the budget.
  • The Discovery Suite was difficult to use. However, I have not used it since it was updated.
Adaptive is well suited for budgeting, budgeting for multiple years and forecasting.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We currently use Adaptive Suite for organizational budgeting/forecasting, as well as for life of grant reporting. The software is used across the whole organization (approximately 40 users). All users have direct access to Adaptive Suites to run monthly reports, as well as for use when they are entering budget data into the system.
  • The software is fairly intuitive for non-finance colleagues to use.
  • Adaptive Suite continues to make ongoing improvements to the software, mainly based on input from its customers.
  • The help desk is VERY responsive and great at following up to ensure that your issue was resolved.
  • Zero suppression of columns.
  • More powerful report writing function.
Adaptive Suite is well suited to produce reports where the template can be set ahead of time. "Zero suppression" for rows is a big help for producing useable reports! Adaptive Suite's report writer is not the most dynamic reporting solution. One of its biggest issues is that it does not have "Zero suppression" for columns.
Orlando Blanco | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is being used by the entire organization for budgeting and forecast purposes. It shows the department heads how they are trending in a live environment. The sales team also uses it to track sales to individual hospitals and OEMs. It provides them useful data and ability to create powerful reports and dashboards.
  • Budgeting
  • Forecasting
  • Reporting
  • Dashboards
  • Add Daily and Weekly ability
  • Integration
Well Suited
  1. Budgeting
  2. Forecasting
  3. Reporting
Improvement Desired
  1. Salesforce/Financial Force Integration
  2. Daily or Weekly Columns instead of monthly only
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Adaptive Insight is used to consolidate various ERP environments to one reporting environment for the entire company. It consolidates information from many places into one place so reporting is easier. Additionally, it interfaces with our forecasting tool and communicates information to various personnel within the company.
  • Assimilates information from various corporate entities into a usable and readable form.
  • Very much like a giant spreadsheet and a reporting tool.
  • Can make communication within organization easier with Discovery tool and export of information back to users.
  • Not for items that more not monthly items, production reports are not appropriate nor daily sales data.
Appropriate for data systems from various forms, spreadsheet , ERP system, CRM and consolidates. Limited graphic capabilities in Discovery module although the Office Connect module is excellent for recurring tasks such as board of director slides etc.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
[It's] Used across the entire organisation for the submission of actual, forecast, and budget financial results plus supplemental desired information around customers, suppliers and employees and the consolidation thereof. Consolidated and segmented reports and insights are used by the CEO and CFO and divisional managers. Also used for the submission of all associated and required financial information by operating subsidiaries to enable the corporate office to generate full IFRS compliant financial statements as required of a publicly listed company. Also used by some entities to complete full financial planning for their business.
  • A good consolidation tool - adequately deals with multi-currency complications of a multi-national with careful configuration
  • Excellent, and easy to use reporting interface
  • Flexible and easy to use
  • Dealing with multi-currency requirements
  • Simpler integration with written reports
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I was a previous user/admin of Adaptive planning for about 4 years. My current company that I recently joined decided to take the plunge on a CPM system. I will be updating this review at different intervals as we go through the life cycle of using Adaptive. The main use case is to move off of spreadsheets and into a holistic "last mile of finance" approach (reporting, analysis, budgeting, and consolidation).
  • Self Service - the ability to allow users to enter their budgets into simple online spreadsheets. Also the ability to utilize the Excel add-in for those who want to download the online spreadsheets and create offline budgets and then resubmit them back into adaptive.
  • Ease of administration - Finance can solely own this system, not necessary for IT to be involved, although it helps to have a technical finance resource who understands data modeling.
  • Reporting - with several ways to extract data (online report, office connect, Excel add-in, and discovery) you have access to all types of data views that are simply given to you at a click of the button. I am able to reproduce accounting ledger results quicker then the accounting team can refresh their Management Reporter reports (for those who use Dynamics GP/SL/AX, you know what I mean).
  • Accessibility - I'm able to access adaptive at home, office, and even when I'm mobile. I would go into meetings with an executive with adaptive on my phone with certain drill downs already loaded, so when they asked me a specific question I could easily answer.
  • Collaboration - Adaptive really allows you to collaborate and communicate with your users in different ways. They are able to "communicate" to you with report notes, cell notes, row splits and you can communicate with them through the task manager. No more meetings to ask "what did you change or what is in this number.
  • Consolidations - while we didn't purchase the consolidation platform, it was something we evaluated and at the time it wasn't up to par with some of the other competitors for certain use cases. I know they are advancing in this areas however.
  • Standard Sheets vs. Cubes Sheets - with more and more accounting systems adding dimensionality I can see the standard sheets having limited lifespan, would like the Cube Sheets to be able to do inline splits, which I think is the best (and perhaps only reason) to use the Standard Sheets, however you lose the dimensionality if you use standard sheets.
  • Reporting/Discovery graphics - not a huge fan of how the reports and discovery graphics look on screen. Would like to see some Tableau/Qlickview like improvement in this area. The colors and graphics sometimes look dated/choppy and definitely not as clean as other BI tools. Definitely have seen improvement in this area over the past 2-3 years but more is needed.
I am a fan of Adaptive but during my evaluation this going around, I did see what the competitors were offering and they all have really good products. It's about use cases. Adaptive is well suited for less and middle complex businesses. High complex business may have to utilize Adaptive but still run certain models in Excel. This hybrid approach is similar to what other competitors offer as well, although some allow you to build full models in the application it's at a higher costs and isn't as self service.
August 22, 2017

Great FP & A System

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Adaptive Suite was used mainly by the Financial Planning & Analysis department to create detailed financial projections and income statement, balance sheet and cash flow projections. It replaced a set of 22 interconnected spreadsheets and allows a much more robust financial model.
  • Headcount planning - this was a thousand times better than using Excel spreadsheets.
  • Variance Analysis - the ability to pivot by any number of dimensions needed allowed for an indepth budget vs actuals process.
  • Office Connect - the ability to link to Excel was extremely useful.
  • It would be nice to have a more clear formula writing system.
Adaptive is great if you have a partially defined financial planning process, but need more security and capability than Excel. If you are not doing any financial planning, it would be best to figure out your processes first.
Zoltan Ilyes | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We are using Adaptive Suite in our FP&A department, primarily for budgeting and forecasting.
  • The easiness of creating reports
  • Having all data stored on the cloud and access it whenever we want
  • The easiness of viewing the financial activity of the company over the time
  • Comparing different versions; i.e actual versus forecast/budget versions
  • Selecting and copying multiple cells
  • Easier formula view structure
  • Changes made by the user log keeping
Great for budgeting and forecasting, less useful in the accounting area for bookkeeping
Frank Jiang | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Adaptive Planning as our primary forecasting and budgeting tool, as well as for rudimentary customer level detail and cube data. It is used by the entire FPA team and allows us to work as a cohesive unit and easily deliver our budget or forecast as a single, seamless process.
  • Love the shared functionality and visibility that Adaptive provides. Being able to see how changes affect the bottom line on the fly and the ability to audit previous changes makes collaboration a breeze.
  • Nice suite of formulas, allowing for easy model creation.
  • Version comparison and creating backups.
  • The UI is a bit dated.
  • The ability to change my default settings (such as copying formulas vs. copying numbers to clipboard) when opening a new window.
  • Drag and drop version comparison, timeframes or levels (UI -related).
Adaptive is well suited for team-driven products that require multiple individuals to contribute to a single product. Adaptive is strong at modeling and doing comparative analysis with historical periods. Adaptive could be easier to use when trying to integrate it with other systems (Tableau, SQL etc.).
Samuel Gibbs, MBA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Adaptive is only used by the finance team at my company although it can be used by the operational org as well. I just find that getting other teams to lean/use adaptive is harder in practice than theory. It is a great tool for forecasting revenue and expenses and is really great at making fast scenario-based forecasts.
  • Very fast. It is fast and easy to change one number and see how it rolls up to the financial statements.
  • Simple interface. Really easy for new people to come in and start using it day one. Still a little much for a non-finance person to use it, but easy for the finance peeps.
  • Poor customer service. We have some complicated problems, but they just haven't seemed super invested in helping us.
Tech companies are a great fit. Easy implementation and pricing model.
Sandy Arami | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
My organization uses Adaptive in our Finance department - specifically FP&A - for financial budgeting and forecasting. In my experience it is the best budgeting and forecasting system I have used. Adaptive is extremely flexible and allows you to make multiple versions of your forecast quickly, which allows you to drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to create and edit a new month's forecast. It also updates in real time seamlessly for all users in an intuitive and powerful UI.
  • Budgeting and Forecasting
  • Collaboration between Business Unit Managers and Budget Owners
  • Reporting - able to build custom reports quickly
  • Would love to see integration with Salesforce
  • Needs more layout options for reporting
  • Requires a "lead user" that knows the modeling and system admin functions extremely well
This is simply the best tool for budgeting and forecasting that I have seen or used. But it is also great for reporting and modeling. If you have accounting data that flows through another software, you can easily import and map that data to Adaptive, but it would be great to see implementation with Salesforce. This is primarily for use by an FP&A team, and even though budget-owners should see the work done in Adaptive, they should not need access to the system itself.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using it across the organization. We use to facilitate our forecasting and tracking our sales opportunities
  • Adaptive allows you to quickly modify information in your model and see the results immediately. You can actually see up to two versions of you forecast against a current version on screen at the same time.
  • The OfficeConnect tool for reporting is an add-in in Excel that is very intuitive to make adhoc reports or reports to be used in board packages. The tool also works with PowerPoint and Word.
  • The implementation of Adaptive is quick. At my prior and initial exposure with Adaptive we implemented in one month. At Circor, I implemented the tool my self in about the same time.
  • Another great selling point for me is that I did not need IT resources to help with the implementation or current use of the system. We load our trial balances and transaction detail each month using Excel.
  • There is not much that I don't like about Adaptive. They usually do a couple of major updates each year that put out new functionality based on what the user community is requesting.
  • One item that I did think needed some work was the Adaptive Discovery module that basically creates a dashboard for your data. It was a little difficult to keep updated and was not easy to build. I have not had the module for the last year or so and I do know they did some updates to enhance the tool.
If you are doing your forecasting in Excel then you can do it in Adaptive. Adaptive will give you more time to analyze the data instead of trying make sure your formulas in Excel are correct. We do percentage of completion accounting and I have built a model that impacts the balance sheet, cash flow, and income statement related to this accounting method.
January 18, 2017

Adaptive Insights Review

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Adaptive Suite not just as a planning tool, but [we] also use its very robust reporting platform, OfficeConnect.
  • Planning
  • Reporting
  • Ease of use
  • Modelling
  • Implementation of Adaptive Connector took more time than expected
Scenarios that Adaptive is well suited to are collaboration on sheets and reporting. Adaptive integration to our ERP/Data Warehouse took longer than anticipated.
Ben Gibson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Adaptive Insights is being used across the entire company as a tool to forecast and budget monthly financial revenues and expenses. It has helped streamline our planning processes by allowing for one source of data input which in turn provides finance with one form of data output or information to build yearly financial budgets/forecasts.
  • Structure of levels/departments so that all managers have specific places to add their business needs.
  • Ability to link separate planning models together to create a complete plan. Relating to the budget manager/user is key. If planning by GL account doesn't make sense for the user then it is nice to build them a separate model that represents their business and then allow Adaptive to pull the needed information together for finance.
  • Different types of models. They have "Sheets" which consists of 3 different types Standard, Model, and Cube. Standard allows you to plan by account (row) by month (column). Model is more for planning in a list view. Cube is like creating a Pivot table in Excel and having the ability to plan differently based on how the accounts are sliced and diced (row vs. column).
  • More functionality with formulas. There are a lot of different places to add a formula and it can sometimes be confusing. As well as when you're building formulas there aren't as many functions like Excel to reference other accounts, months, or versions (plan).
  • Reports - they allow the building/modifying of reports but when you are needing each user to modify the reports with notes you are also giving them access to modifying how the report is run. It would be nice to see some added permissions for report building vs. modifying vs. editing notes.
Suited for planning cross functional department expenses, cost, balance sheet, and cashflow assumptions. Not suited for detailed statistical revenue/unit planning by stock code by week/day.
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