Adapting to the constantly changing start-up's needs
March 15, 2018

Adapting to the constantly changing start-up's needs

Amy Kee, CPA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Adaptive Insights

Adaptive is very easy to use, but it requires some training to get comfortable with it.
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.
  • The most positive impact has been on time. While it took some time to get things set up correctly, once we did, we were able to report results very quickly.
  • The budgeting process has gone much more quickly.
  • What-if scenarios are a little trickier. There are multiple ways you can do it. We have chosen to use assumptions for percentages and then copy the original version to a "what-if" version and change the assumption it is pointing to. However, this is a bit clunky.
  • Month-end reporting is getting faster and faster the more we automate through Adaptive.
Adaptive allows you to be very precise. Accuracy is good but is still very dependent upon the information you put in. The more you automate things, the better. Accuracy is lost when overrides or manual inputs are used. Adaptive definitely helps with faster reporting and analysis. Ad hoc reporting is where we have seen the fastest and most beneficial results.
Adaptive has honestly made me and my role indispensable. I am generally the only one in my organization trained and comfortable enough with it to be able to make changes easily. And, management is very pleased with the quick and painless results we are able to get from Adaptive.
We previously only used Excel for budgeting and reporting. We now use Adaptive for all budgeting and use an add-on product called Office Connect to build reports that automate our data each month. We find the Office Connect reporting a little more user-friendly than the in-house reporting feature.
Internally, Adaptive makes budgeting and reporting amazingly simple. External reporting has been more of a challenge, as some external users of reports want more visibility into where the numbers came from.

Workday Adaptive Planning Feature Ratings

Long-term financial planning
10
Financial budgeting
10
Forecasting
10
Scenario modeling
5
Management reporting
8
Financial data consolidation
10
Journal entries and reports
5
Multi-currency management
10
Intercompany Eliminations
10
Minority Ownership
10
Local and consolidated reporting
10
Detailed Audit Trails
10
Financial Statement Reporting
10
Management Reporting
8
Excel-based Reporting
8
Automated board and financial reporting
6
Personalized dashboards
10
Color-coded scorecards
10
KPIs
10
Cost and profitability analysis
10
Key Performance Indicator setting
10
Benchmarking with external data
Not Rated
Flat file integration
10
Excel data integration
10
Direct links to 3rd-party data sources
10