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Adaptive Insights -- a great solution for planning
April 19, 2019

Adaptive Insights -- a great solution for planning

Ben Balch | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Adaptive Insights, a Workday company

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.
  • Before using Adaptive Insights, our annual budget process involved emailing spreadsheets back and forth. That's a very time-consuming and error-prone process. Adaptive Insights has made the process much more efficient for the Finance team and the business managers.
When we were evaluating the software solutions we wanted:
1) A product that would efficiently consolidate our annual budget.
2) Something that would be easily adopted by the entire company.
3) Had built-in audit trails.
4) Had robust reporting capabilities.
5) Had the ability to easily create different scenarios.

Adaptive Insights addressed all of our needs
Adaptive Insights is very good for:
- Annual Planning.
- Forecasting.
- Scenario Planning.

The user interface is essentially a spreadsheet in the cloud, so there is not much of a learning curve to get business users started. While it feels like a spreadsheet, it's much more powerful, as it provides a real-time consolidated roll-up and built-in audit trail.

Workday Adaptive Planning Feature Ratings

9.6
Long-term financial planning
10
Financial budgeting
10
Forecasting
10
Scenario modeling
10
Management reporting
8
8.8
Financial data consolidation
10
Journal entries and reports
5
Multi-currency management
Not Rated
Intercompany Eliminations
Not Rated
Minority Ownership
Not Rated
Local and consolidated reporting
10
Detailed Audit Trails
10
9.0
Financial Statement Reporting
10
Management Reporting
9
Excel-based Reporting
8
Automated board and financial reporting
9
XBRL support for regulatory filing
Not Rated
Not Rated
Personalized dashboards
Not Rated
Color-coded scorecards
Not Rated
KPIs
Not Rated
Cost and profitability analysis
Not Rated
Key Performance Indicator setting
Not Rated
Benchmarking with external data
Not Rated
10.0
Flat file integration
10
Excel data integration
10
Direct links to 3rd-party data sources
Not Rated
BI Standard Reporting ()
Not Rated
Ad-hoc Reporting ()
Not Rated
Report Output and Scheduling ()
Not Rated
Data Discovery and Visualization ()
Not Rated
Access Control and Security ()
Not Rated
Mobile Capabilities ()
Not Rated

Using Adaptive Insights, a Workday company

Adaptive Insights is easy to use and easy for end users to adopt. We use Adaptive Insights for expense planning, forecasting, and scenario planning. We are a small organization and have several non-technical people that have been able to adopt the system. The product is very similar to a spreadsheet, so anyone with a basic working knowledge of how to enter numbers in a spreadsheet could be trained to use Adaptive Insights.

If your planning is more complex, you'll need someone with the appropriate level of technical skills to help facilitate that level of planning.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Well integrated
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Requires technical support
  • Data input/capture.
  • Consolidated reporting.
  • Version Control.
  • Granular reporting between versions.