Great resources, especially for new analysts
March 23, 2018

Great resources, especially for new analysts

Samantha Monastra | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Adaptive Insights

The Adaptive Suite is well-rounded. We love the add-on OfficeConnect because it allows us to quickly pull data from Adaptive in a report format. Once you set up the OfficeConnect, it's as easy as pushing a button to re-run. This has been especially helpful for month-end reporting and reconciling data in the Budget.

Adaptive Insights is not used by the whole organization; I believe only the Finance and Accounting departments have access to it since those departments spend the most time in Adaptive Planning. We do have certain people from other departments use Adaptive Planning during budget season, but their use is limited.

Adaptive Insights helps address broad finance, accounting, and budgeting related questions and serves as an informational resource in that way. My current job is my first time working in an FP&A (Financial Planning and Analysis) department, and the "FP&A Glossary" on Adaptive Insights is very helpful. It is full of terms you hear on a day-to-day basis and provides short definitions so someone can look up a term quickly and continue to perform their job responsibilities.

  • Adaptive Insights has so many good resources and easy filtering capabilities with active searching. When you go to a section of Adaptive Insights, you will see filters at the top of the page. As you change them, the contents of the page change to suit what you're looking for. This makes it easy to find the resources you need!
  • As previously mentioned, the FP&A Glossary is a great feature due to its concise definition of many common terms in FP&A.
  • I have not had much experience with the eBooks section of Adaptive Insights, but there are is a wide variety of topics to explore, such as rolling forecasts, and best practices for controllers.
  • On the Infographics page, I would love to see a thumbnail of the infographic before clicking on it. In general, I love that when you hover over a box, you get a more detailed description, but I would also love the ability to hover and then click to see a thumbnail before opening the full page.
  • Similarly, I think the Videos page should have the length of each video somewhere on the squares. This would help people judge how much time they would need to watch each one all the way through, and be able to make an informed decision about how many they could watch in between meetings.
  • There is no free text search bar.
  • We use Adaptive Planning as our main budgeting software. Adaptive is always releasing new features to improve the functionality, and this makes working it is much more efficient.
  • Adaptive has many resources to help you use Adaptive. However, not many answers can be found on Google.

We use the Reports module in Adaptive Planning every week, if not every day. It's helpful to quickly refresh reports and allows others at our company to run self-service reports. This has been invaluable since it frees up FP&A so we can perform more analysis.

The OfficeConnect for Excel Add-On has also been very helpful in providing quick on-the-fly reporting to others within the company. We have limited licenses for this since it is not as intuitive for a first-time user.


Adaptive Insights has helped my role because of the quality information it provides. I believe the reports and content on Adaptive Insights have been reviewed extensively before being published, so it's unlike searching Google and being unsure of the validity of a found article.
I am unable to rate Adaptive Insights higher than 7 out of 10 because I have not fully explored the functionality. Based on what I know and what I have seen, I would definitely recommend Adaptive Insights. I would love if more people at my company used it, so then we could share content with each other. There is a lot of content for one person to explore.

Workday Adaptive Planning Feature Ratings

Financial budgeting
9
Forecasting
9
Scenario modeling
9
Management reporting
10
Financial data consolidation
9
Journal entries and reports
9
Minority Ownership
5
Local and consolidated reporting
Not Rated
Detailed Audit Trails
Not Rated
Financial Statement Reporting
9
Management Reporting
10
Excel-based Reporting
Not Rated
Automated board and financial reporting
Not Rated
XBRL support for regulatory filing
Not Rated
Personalized dashboards
Not Rated
Color-coded scorecards
Not Rated
KPIs
Not Rated
Cost and profitability analysis
8
Key Performance Indicator setting
Not Rated
Benchmarking with external data
Not Rated
Flat file integration
Not Rated
Excel data integration
9
Direct links to 3rd-party data sources
Not Rated