I have used Workday Adaptive Planning since 2017 across two industries (airport and staffing) and I have been amazed of their improvements since then. Working on Excel models and using Access to consolidate multiple branches was a pain and time sucker. I currently do all planning of revenue, COS and operating expenses including personnel in Workday Adaptive Planning and the up-to-date financials as soon as users input their data has been a game changer. I highly recommend Workday Adaptive Planning as your forecasting and budgeting software.
Pros
Consolidation
Modeling
Forecasting
Cons
Security in levels
Likelihood to Recommend
If you are planning for multiple branches (at least 10) and revenue streams, Adaptive Planning will be perfect for consolidating actuals and budget and reporting on-the-fly.
Every department in the organization uses Adaptive Insights. Most of the users do budgeting and reviewing of actuals in Adaptive. It allows us to transmit the financials to each specific person without having to send individualized monthly reports.
Pros
Reporting
Budgeting
Likelihood to Recommend
We have only just started using Adaptive. This is something that we are going to be using more features as time goes on. I use it to review the actuals to budget during month end close. The reporting we were able to build in the system has helped speed our review process up.
Cons
I think learning how to build the reports is the drawback. I currently don't do that for myself.
We use Adaptive across the whole organization. We use it for budgeting including sales forecasting, expenses, sales commissions calculations, capital expenditure planning and various budget reporting. We also use it for our financial reporting system throughout the organization. We are starting to build out dashboard and kpi metrics.
Pros
We like the flexibility of reporting and being able to drill into the detail and both a customer/item level for sales and account level for expenses. It gives much more information available to the user in a single sign on.
The budget process is very nice. You have the ability to roll over budgets from year to year and make modifications to them. You can go back to a previous version and see exactly how things were budgeted. You have the ability to see prior year actuals by account when budgeting for the next year.
We are starting to use Adaptive for a rolling forcast/projection tool as well by using a second version of the budget and making that more adaptable to how things are performing throughout the year as well as what is still to come.
Likelihood to Recommend
Adaptive is a nice tool for pulling in data from various sources not just the ERP. We bring in payroll hours data so the operations team can easily review hours worked versus the hours planned because we have a lot of seasonal employees who are budgeted more in an hour time frame by function rather than by person specifically. We also bring in customer level data so you can drill into a customer and get to the transaction level detail when needed. Training is key. You have to keep users on it so they don't forget how to use it. It helps if you you can have some power users or analyst type people who really understand the product.
Cons
We wish some of the dashboard reporting had some more options in terms of formatting to better show actuals vs. budget or prior year in the charts. There are a lot of color options but not as much in terms of lines or other markings.
You can drill into the account detail to see the transactions for the monthly information but you cannot not drill into the account detail for the year-to-date columns. This would be a useful feature to have available.
VU
Verified User
Director in Finance and Accounting (Environmental Services company, 51-200 employees)
Adaptive Suite is being used across the company by approximately 80 budget owners. It allows our company to make real time changes to our budget so that all budget managers can see the impact.
Pros
Real time changes.
No need to distribute countless Excel budget templates to budget owners.
All budget owners are able to view supporting information to their budget values.
Cons
I still find Discovery hard to understand.
We have learned a lot about saving reports to our personal folders but a few got lost along the way.
Likelihood to Recommend
I think it is important to understand the budget owners and their likeliness to go into a software and make changes. It is also very important to understand your chart of accounts and company structure. Adaptive Suite allows for multiple levels and workflow and this can be very helpful during the set up phase.
This year we have rolled out Adaptive Suite to 80+ users at Clarke. It's used by the Finance, Sales, Operations and the Executive Team for planning and reporting. We've just about abandoned Excel and gone all in with Adaptive in our budget process which is helping us reduce non-value added time. Managers are seeing real-time data sooner, and we're able to do a lot more analysis with our data than we ever have before. Adaptive Suite is giving more visibility to the organization to see how all the components impact each other.
Pros
Adaptive Suite does a great job of consolidating infomation.
Adaptive Reporting is an excellent tool to get real time results to users.
Navigation is easy and very intuitive. This made the training of 80 users pretty easy.
Cons
I would like to see a little more customization in the Adaptive reporting tool.
Java is a little troublesome, but it's on the docket to remove from the software.
Likelihood to Recommend
I believe the software could be built to support any business. Planning can be done in detail or at a high level or a combination of both. I asked to use a hands on demo before I purchased the product. This helped solidifiy Adaptive Suite as a leader in this space for me. Any questions or reservations that I had about the software were answered through building out a demo of our own.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Finance and Accounting (Environmental Services company, 51-200 employees)
SolomonEdwards Enterprise Performance Management consulting solutions help clients select and implement cloud based finance solutions that are economical, easy to use and rapidly deployable. Adaptive Insights is used by over 20 clients across multiple industries and sizes. The primary business problem addressed is to allow collaboration of many departments in the budgeting process.
Pros
Great User Interface .....Easy for non-accounting people to use.
Reporting - The reporting is primarily drag and drop with various attributes to allow for multiple views of data with the same template.
Analysis - The addition of Adaptive Discovery add to the abiliity to analyze financial and operational data.
Integration - Adaptive Planning integration includes GL balances, transaction detail and non GL sources such as Salesforce and Payroll data
Cons
The consolidation module works well but will need to handle more complexity at the enterprise level.
The process and workflow modules continue to develop.
The integration modules continue to add more operations source data.
Likelihood to Recommend
Adaptive Insight's personnel modeling capability is a key process. The integration of personnel data from the payroll source allows for more detailed personnel tax and benefit calculations. Large data pools with advanced reporting may require more database flexibility. The security access is key in allowing multiple resource collaboration. The use of dimensions and attributes allow for budget calculations to be more consistent.
