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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How Workday Adaptive Planning Differs From Its Competitors
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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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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
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February 26, 2024
Workday Adaptive Planning – It’s Versatile!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Workday Adaptive Planning for budget and forecast planning, reporting (utilizing both web and office connect excel reports), and analytics. The system is primarily used by finance now, until we role it out to other departments in our business; which we’ve already begun to do. With Workday Adaptive Planning we are able to compile large amounts of data from the bottoms up but also have the flexibility of modeling at a high level. The system is versatile and can be used for not only financials, but headcount, and performance data as well.
- Creation of Versions.
- Reporting and Dashboarding.
- Model Flexibility.
- Web reports within Dashboard would be great.
- Version to Version referencing within model formulas.
- Calculations within reports that allow you to add data across different versions.
February 13, 2024
Workday FINS and Adaptive simultaneous implementation, 3 years on
Our company's core financial forecasting is done in Adaptive, integrated with our Workday FINS platform for our GL. Adaptive is the key component in our financial and company performance
forecasting. We were coming off of homebuilt and manual planning tools, and the
shift has made us a lot more responsive to the changing environment of the last
3 years. Executive team trusts the results, and is confident that we have the
tools we need to provide insights.
- Our annual budgeting and forecasting process at a company and cost center level
- integration with Workday FINS is seamless
- Integration with Excel is a huge bonus and really where our users spend the most time.
- We don't know what we don't know...more training on specific use cases would have expanded our use of the tools
- There is certainly a cost associated with it, we're glad we have the combined package with Workday
- The tool has its own language and lexicon, and you have to adapt (no pun) to it
December 15, 2023
CareStar recommends Adaptive Insights for reporting and dashboards
We use it for financial statements, budgeting, forecasting, and other operational reporting. We also use the dashboard for both financial and operational data. It is used by our executives and all our department directors. It has greatly streamlined our budgeting, forecasting, and financial reporting processes. Additionally, the dashboard provides a means to communicate KPIs in an efficient manner.
- Financial Reporting - financial statements are done instantaneously once the books are closed. There is no processing required. Recipients of the reports can obtain everything they need self-service. There is no distribution process required.
- Budgeting/forecasting - We converted our Excel process (which used 30 linked workbooks, 20 sheets each, and 50+ formulas each sheet, for a total of 30,000 formulas) to Adaptive. Now that the model is set up, new forecasts can be set up in minutes, rather than hours/days. The whole model is driver-based and easy to manage. It is much more intuitive for our directors, too. All they need to supply are updated drivers to run a new budget or forecast.
- Dashboard - We now have a company-wide mechanism for communicating KPIs, and both financial and non-financial data. Data can be presented both visually or in numeric formats.
- The Adaptive Planning portion of the suite is very mature and has few short-comings. The biggest improvement I can think of is the ability for formulas to cross versions.
- The Adaptive Discovery (dashboard) portion of the suite is much less mature. There are many chart types not available that are in Excel. For example, I would like to have an X-Y scatter chart to use. Also, some of the dial (chart) types have very little formatting options (like pie charts).
- While the object of the web-based product is to eliminate paper printing, there are times when it is necessary to print financial statements. It would be nice to print directly to pdf with the ability to format the reports.
Workday is used by our entire company to manage and handle all aspects of Human Resources, Budgeting, Individual Goals, Training, and keeping track of each individual learning and courses they have taken. From an HR management standpoint, it is the backbone of our company.
- Keeps everything HR and Team management wise in one place
- Excellent and easy to use layout and user interface
- It's very easy to navigate and find your way around even for first time users
- Requires minimal training to get up and running
- Sometimes it can be a little difficult to find smaller details within the software that you might be looking for
- Can be a little overwhelming to those that are just looking to use one particular function
December 16, 2022
Great product when properly trained
I use Adaptive Insights for mainly budgeting purposes and running monthly budget vs actual reports. It has helped the company dramatically with ensuring that we are using the correct and same version of the approved budget. We have 27 different entities creating budgets and within those entities up to 80 different departments. Before Adaptive Insights, there were a lot of Excel spreadsheets emailed back and forth. This created issues with version control. Adaptive Insights has also forced the company across all entities to map their chart of accounts in a similar fashion and use accounts for the same purpose.
- It does well with version control. I can ensure that all 27 entities know exactly which version is the correct budget that is approved.
- It does well with scenario planning. I can easily make adjustments with to the budget whether that is pushing sales, expenses, headcount, or capital projects.
- It does a good job with enforcing unity with the chart of accounts.
- It does permissions for different groups well.
- It did reporting groups and distribution well.
- There has been a real lack of training. This has caused issues especially with creating new reports.
- There could be better shortcut keys similar to Excel.
- There could be a better search functionality with the self tutorial area.
We are using Adaptive as our system of record planning and reporting application. The FP&A team is the primary editor of information, but read-only information is widely consumed across the org.
- Excellent documentation with articles and videos.
- Strong implementations network of consultants.
- Accessible staff for Q&A (like formulas Friday and other weekly sessions).
- Being cloud only, occasionally the model may be slow to load or update.
- Certain features like user assigned sheets are edit only or no access (no read-only access).
- Dimension level security is coming in a future release (Fall 2019).
- Cannot have multiple security profiles per user (one profile per account).
January 09, 2022
Finance
I use Workday Adaptive Planning to track the budget and account for business expenses. From the time I started using Workday Adaptive Planning, I have become efficient at managing expenses in my team. Today we do not need to depend on accountants to provide department managers with monthly expense information for analysis and management [discussion].
- Budget management
- Expense tracking
- Finance management
- There should be a seamless integration between the accounting and the budget allocated.
We use Workday Adaptive Planning to create a detailed financial plan for our entire company. The userbase includes Sales, Operations, Finance, and HR. In addition to using Adaptive to develop a bottoms-up financial plan, starting with sales volume/revenue, detailed labor planning, cost of goods sold modeling, we use Adaptive to pull financial results from our ERP system (SAP) and report on Plan vs Actual performance.
- Version Management. Adaptive lets us manage many versions/scenarios all in one platform with the robust ability to compare them to each other.
- Processing Performance. With the Elastic Hypercube technology that was implemented a few years back, we can watch changes flow through a complex web of formulas and arrive at an answer within seconds.
- Audit Trail. Our administrators love the ability to see and report on who made what changes when, which leads to real accountability within the organization.
- Variable Time Roll-ups. Different entities within our company look at "years" differently, but we're only able to specify one global time roll-up for aggregating data quickly, which can lead to some confusion.
- Administrative UI. Management of Access Rules and ordering sheets from an administrative point of view can be a bit tedious and have received less attention than other features recently.
- List Sheet Reporting. Any sheet that is a variable list of things (like People, Capital Projects, Marketing Programs) is somewhat constrained in how it can be reported on. Adaptive provides two kinds of reports but both leave something to be desired when reporting on this kind of data.
December 31, 2019
Reshaping The Financial Planning Landscape
We are working towards Adaptive Insights being the single source of truth for Financial Reporting within the Comcast Technology Solutions by combining Business Data to drive forecasting. We were the first group within Comcast to implement Adaptive. There are other instances that are currently being launched as well.
Right now it is primarily the FP&A team that makes changes, and for revenue, for we have business operations partners that input their customer revenue forecast.
We previously were using Essbase to do all of our planning, but the CTS group operates quite differently compared to the rest of Comcast. Imagine operating a startup inside a cable box. Adaptive gives us the flexibility to make detailed changes to our business units and accounts quickly and have immediate reporting results. As opposed to keeping track of detailed Essbase strings, making changes and then waiting every two hours to make sure they were made correctly.
Right now it is primarily the FP&A team that makes changes, and for revenue, for we have business operations partners that input their customer revenue forecast.
We previously were using Essbase to do all of our planning, but the CTS group operates quite differently compared to the rest of Comcast. Imagine operating a startup inside a cable box. Adaptive gives us the flexibility to make detailed changes to our business units and accounts quickly and have immediate reporting results. As opposed to keeping track of detailed Essbase strings, making changes and then waiting every two hours to make sure they were made correctly.
- Live Reporting - The ability to constantly see your change impacts, using the Audit Trail to identify the users making the change, and transaction details for actual significantly freed up valuable bandwidth to spend more time on forecast accuracy.
- Flexibility to change Business Structure and have those changes flow through historically without any effort. Used to have various Xref files everywhere.
- Corporate Consolidation - Being able to have multiple Organizations roll up into a group that is not managed by us. We still need to use export into Essbase for our HQ partners until Adaptive can fully integrate the two seamlessly.
- Web Reporting can be inflexible at times, especially when it comes to notes. Office Connect helps to fill that gap, but we would rather use web reporting when we can.
December 19, 2019
Adaptive Insights - Great for Budgeting and Planning
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Adaptive Insights is our main budgeting and forecasting software used by the entire organization. Our finance team is responsible for making all updates to our operating model within Adaptive, and budget owners currently use Adaptive for its reporting functionalities so they can see what is currently in their approved budget and any budget versus actuals analysis they need.
- Dimensions and attributes that allow us to slice up data in many different views depending on what is needed
- Ease of importing and downloading data
- Sheets can be slow to load at times
- There is a relatively steep learning curve for formula syntax/logic (but this applies to most other software)
December 10, 2019
A good tool for the experienced user.
Adaptive Insights is used as a budgeting, forecasting, and financial statement tool for the Finance and Accounting group. The tool also supports senior leadership for tracking financials and targets that have been approved by management.
- Adaptive Insights does a good job allowing the user to build in automatic calculations for forecasting. E.g. employee benefit cost by plan type chosen by employees.
- Another beneficial feature of adaptive is the office connect feature that allows financials to be populated directly into a board deck.
- It can be difficult to learn how to build the references needed to make sheets and versions connect.
- The service can be slow to load at times. Many times I'm just waiting on the data to refresh before I can update the next step.
December 09, 2019
Early user of Adaptive Insights
Adaptive Insights is being used to generate reports for quarterly and yearly reporting across many of our clients (external and internal). It helps keep all the data centralized and organized for report building. There are a multitude of features that adaptive insights has that make extraction of data as well as implementation smooth.
- Organized
- Many Features
- Efficient
- User interface is tricky
- Steep learning curve
- Freezes occasionally
November 18, 2019
The Real-Time data system for all organizations!
We are only using the product in our Accounting and Finance department. Mainly, Adaptive Insights has enabled us to perform a plethora of tasks, ranging from month-end reporting, break-even analysis, ad-hoc requests, and as a data warehouse to store multiple systems worth of necessary data that helps with business decisions. We have not fully used every aspect of the system, however, we are driving towards that now. I have only been using the system for the last 4 months and all I can say is, the features, the cleanliness and the organization of Adaptive Insights has given, not only myself, but our overall team a very useful, business tool.
- The customer support services have been very quick and useful to all my pertinent questions relating to the development and issues associated with the sheets, formulas and any other question I may have.
- Many of the instructional guides and examples enabled me to ramp up quickly, learning the system. This not only benefited myself, but the team as a whole.
- The Torchbearer Community has been a wonderful resource. I have been able to explore similar questions other analysts have had, that I had, and examine how they resolved nuances or issues with their associated questions.
- It would be beneficial to me, as a user, if there was a library of documentation for every type of feature. This could be something regarding formula building, understanding how attributes work, with examples, or a location for basic and advance documentation on Sheet/Model/Cubes.
- I would like to have the ability to directly assign some dimensions to accounts easier. A drag and drop feature for that would be interesting. This has been a challenge for me when new dimensions are built and I am unable to assign them to new accounts.
- I would also like to see some more formulas or an easier way to do some basic tasks. For example a simple YTD function instead of running a simple, yet long string of texts for the formulas. Or the option for selecting YTD features, removing the need of the formula all together.
November 14, 2019
Adaptive Insights - Definitely a Winner ... Easy to Use, Efficiency Gained, and Errors Reduced
Phase 1 of our project included our Administrative team and C-Suite only. Adaptive has helped with 'real time' collaboration efforts among our team using Process Tracker for Task Assignments and a communication medium, as well as Workflow for protecting data integrity during the planning process. It helped streamline and gain efficiencies in planning, 'what if' scenarios, and reporting; it's also reduced the inevitable, unintentional Excel workbook errors.
- The design of the planning sheets, flexible functioning of the assumptions/drivers, and familiar formula creation has great user appeal since it simulates the similarities with the Excel worksheet interface, so buy-in/ownership from a Finance group perspective is easily overcome even for those that have a bit of 'change-phobia'.
- The Finance group REALLY can run this CPM product. No IT support needed which is critical from a resource standpoint.
- User collaboration is made simple and easy with the Process Tracker functionality and further supported by offering users the ability to enter cell notes on planning items, sheet notes, line notes in analysis reporting, share reports via email, snapshot reports, and attach documents related to quotes for the planning process - just to name a few little hidden gems that serve us well in the planning process resulting in greater efficiencies.
- The Adaptive Learning Center provides a wealth of information for users in a how-to-do well-guided format with both written and video learning mediums. In addition, the involvement in the Torchbearers Community provides a community chat portal to pose questions and gain additional information on best practices from other Adaptive users of varying levels of expertise.
- Being rather new to the Adaptive product and our laser focus on capitalizing on the advantages we were severely lacking in our former budgeting tool, I don't have any solid examples of areas or room for improvement yet. As we continue to gain familiarity and begin our implementation of Phase 2 with our Program areas, I will be able to assess more in-depth whether Adaptive meets our needs fully as more individuals with varying capacities and capabilities will be involved in our Phase 2 roll out, so feedback will be plentiful.
April 19, 2019
Adaptive Insights -- a great solution for planning
We have been using Adaptive Insights for five years. We started using it for annual expense planning and have expanded to forecasting, scenario planning, and what-if analysis. Adaptive Insights is used by the entire organization. Business managers and finance use the software for budgeting, reporting, forecasting, and scenario planning.
- It helps to produce a consolidated budget very quickly.
- Good built-in audit trails.
- Good reporting for variance analysis.
- The software allows you to plan at a very granular level, but the reporting at a granular level between plan, actuals, and other versions can be challenging.
October 01, 2018
Adaptive Insights - Market Leader
We use/used Adaptive Insights to manage the current budget, forecasting (both operationally and financially), and managing our Sales capacity. We work with the varying department heads on setting a forecast, then meet both monthly and quarterly to review their results against the forecast. Adaptive has allowed us to get timely insights, so that we can properly pro-actively act, rather than being reactive.
- Adaptive is simple and easy to use with anyone that has any experience using Microsoft Excel. It is unintuitive, and the learning curve is relatively short.
- Version control is another key attribute. You can manage multiple versions, and lock them down when appropriate.
- User interface could be updated. For those that are end users (department heads), they don't live in Excel all-day long and don't have that same love for how data is displayed.
- Some softwares are now using historical data to give you true insights...and to pro-actively reach out to you. For a great planning tool, there needs to be pro-active insights by the module.
March 23, 2018
Ahead of the curve.
We use Adaptive Insights for corporate budgeting, scenario planning and reporting financial information out to the business. Our FP&A group use Adaptive as the central database for financial planning internationally and are the main users of the system. Our stakeholders outside of finance also have a read-only view of the system.
The key business problems we have addressed by using Adaptive are:
- significantly improved budgeting and forecasting cycles (in terms of time and quality).
- Improved transparency with the rest of the business.
The key business problems we have addressed by using Adaptive are:
- significantly improved budgeting and forecasting cycles (in terms of time and quality).
- Improved transparency with the rest of the business.
- Adaptive handles the concept of "versions" very well. This makes budgeting, forecasting, and scenario planning particularly easy. You can compare actuals vs budget, vs budget @ different rate, vs forecast or vs prior year all at the quick click of a button.
- Multi-user, multi-location, multi-currency handled with ease within the system.
- Adding or removing GL codes, levels or dimensions is really easy and is updated across the entire model.
- The reporting writing part of the solution is excellent. Once the data is in, you can report any parameter against any other.
- For reforecasting (e.g. doing 3 + 9 or 6 + 6), it would be useful to do constant currency analysis for versions that are "hybrid" (i.e. contain actual and plan data). At the moment, the virtual version functionality only works properly for actual or plan only versions.
- We are a company going through a process of changing financial years and trying to plan over multiple financial periods of different lengths. I have found it very difficult to handle this in the system elegantly.
- It would be good if there were more "template" models for various common business scenarios (e.g. sets of standard modeled sheets available for personnel and fixed assets) or sets of standard cubes for revenue or projects.
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
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 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.
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.
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 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.
October 23, 2017
Adaptive will save you hours every month and enable you to do things that were never possible before
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.