Adaptive Suite - check it out!
November 10, 2017
Adaptive Suite - check it out!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Adaptive Suite
We use Adaptive Suite as our primary budgeting and forecasting tool. The Suite is managed by the Finance team but the business owners have access to view reports, and update their budgets and forecasts. We were using Excel spreadsheets prior to implementing the tool, and we found that the spreadsheets were not scalable, were prone to errors, and it was difficult to build the sophistication that we needed in our forecasting. We are in high-growth mode and needed more agility with our planning.
- Adaptive Suite makes it easy to see the impact of a single change through out all financial statements. For example, if a sales rep leaves, adding the end date to the Personnel sheet will not only affect the personnel cost, but will also flow through to sales bookings, revenue projections, A/R, etc.
- Adaptive Suite allows business owners and the executives to access reports, dashboards, and details of their actuals and budgets in a self-service manner. The tool is fairly easy to utilize, and being the cloud means that the end users don't have to wait for the admins to refresh the data tables or system. This allows for better utilization of the finance team on value-add activities, while providing more transparency to the business owners.
- The building and maintenance of the model does not need highly specialized coding skills or IT help. Formula syntax is closely aligned to Excel, accounts are easy to set up and customize, and the flexibility of the model allows for company-specific requirements to be met. The recent releases have also included more flexibility with time, allowing for planning in unique time groupings (semesters, trimesters, by week, and other unique time divisions).
- Users can add notes directly in the tool, eliminating the need for email chains or sharing Excel files. The Finance team can indicate areas of concern and business owners can respond, with all comments in the tool. This keeps all history and context in one place so it can be referred to later.
- It would be really useful to have better help documents for formulas. While the syntax is close to Excel, there are differences and the help documents are not as easy to navigate or as comprehensive as you might find in Excel.
- There needs to be more flexibility for security in the Dashboard module. Right now, security in Dashboards follows the security set up for viewing the data sheets. While this is usually fine, there are executive dashboards that need to allow all executives to view total company metrics, even though they should not see the data sheets of their colleagues departments.
- It would be great to have a way to make a true "static" version, almost like copy-paste values. Some formulas can be determined by version, but other formulas will apply to the entire instance and so changes to that formula will change all of the versions, even locked versions. When the budget has been approved, those values need to stay static, even if a formula has to be changed later in the year.
- Creation of the board book and slides have gone from 4 hours to 15 minutes with Adaptive OfficeConnect. The team can make updates to the materials quickly as the CFO and leadership look at the numbers and want to tweak the forecast.
- Accuracy and trust in the budget and forecast model has gone up significantly. Many formula errors were found in prior budgets as they were loaded into Adaptive for historical purposes. With Adaptive, leadership trusts that amounts are not missing from sums, that drivers are consistent across the organization, and how numbers are derived are transparent through the "Explore Cell" function.
- The finance team is able to quickly review the actuals versus budget at each month-end and business users are able to access the month-end reports themselves. This self-service aspect allows the business owners more transparency and more accountability for their numbers.
We have seen faster and more responsive what-if analysis. There is definitely an increase in accuracy and data quality as well as more sophistication to the forecast model. We are able to analyze the actuals to see what drivers are projecting accurate forecasts and which drivers need further analysis. This has made our model richer as well as more accurate.
My role is the admin of Adaptive Suite, as well as reviewing month-end reporting and compiling the forecast. Adaptive has enabled me to build a more sophisticated model compared to the Excel model that we used previously. I spend less time checking that my sums are correct, that changes in one part of the model have flowed through correctly to other parts of the model, and that I have the most recent Excel model. In this way, I am able to spend more time on value-add activities, as well as making sure that the forecast is as realistic as possible. I have also been able to design new reports and build out new parts of the model to address different business problems.
I have not used any other products like Adaptive Suite. I have only ever used Excel templates and models with VBA and models.