Adaptive Budgeting Software
October 24, 2017

Adaptive Budgeting Software

Bryan Schmidt | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Adaptive Suite

Adaptive operates like Excel and most business managers know Excel. Most of the effort and lift reside with the managers. There is more of a technical expertise required for maintenance, dash-boarding and report writing. But, the admin staff are fewer and can be staffed by subject matter experts.
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.
  • Staffing. Almost certain we would have had to hire a full-time budget analyst to process budgets pre-Adaptive. Savings in labor for salary and benefits is about $150 k annually.
  • Quicker ability to report and complete the budget process. Before Adaptive, the budget process took about 4 months. We have shrunk the time required to about 3 months with additional time now for analysis.
  • What if reporting. Nice to see the impact of changes in the budget with a quick turn around time to report.
Single source of truth. Pre-Adaptive I might have had 2-3 excel spreadsheets and difficult to determine which was the correct spreadsheets. Now, all the data resides within Adaptive.

Dashboards. No dashboards pre-Adaptive. Now the dashboards provide a quick summary of the key numbers and metrics.

Response time. Ability to report quicker and more accurately. The time to review the product in final form used to take 2 people 16 hours combined. That time to review has been reduced to 1 person for 2 hours.
I used to have 185 spreadsheets and 400 workbooks pre-Adaptive. Now I have about 10 with Adaptive. I'm able to now refocus time on analysis, helping other business managers and providing better reporting. My time is now more efficient and effective. I've been able to redeploy my time to better value added activities.
Other than Excel, we did not look at other systems. Key for us was also a bridge or link to our current ERP system, Intacct. I also researched retention of customers with Adaptive. I could not find any vendors who left Adaptive. Strong retention.
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.

Workday Adaptive Planning Feature Ratings

Long-term financial planning
9
Financial budgeting
9
Forecasting
Not Rated
Scenario modeling
9
Management reporting
10
Financial data consolidation
9
Journal entries and reports
8
Multi-currency management
Not Rated
Intercompany Eliminations
7
Minority Ownership
Not Rated
Local and consolidated reporting
9
Detailed Audit Trails
7
Financial Statement Reporting
9
Management Reporting
9
Excel-based Reporting
10
Automated board and financial reporting
8
XBRL support for regulatory filing
Not Rated
Personalized dashboards
8
Color-coded scorecards
7
KPIs
8
Cost and profitability analysis
9
Key Performance Indicator setting
9
Benchmarking with external data
7
Flat file integration
8
Excel data integration
8
Direct links to 3rd-party data sources
Not Rated