Is Adaptive Planning right for your business?

Great Product

We are going into our third budget cycle using Adaptive and it has made our process much more efficient. Prior to using Adaptive we played budget ping pong, bouncing spreadsheets back and forth and then once we landed on a final version the Finance team consolidated the numbers. Adaptive is great because you can see the impact of a change to the consolidated budget in real time. This is a great software for the Finance team as well as the budget / business managers.

Pros

There are many great features including: audit trails, notes, role permissions and security, the ability to quickly create versions, great technical support, and it’s cloud based.

Cons

There is a report builder in Adaptive and it’s easy to use. However, I do feel like they have focused on making improvements in other areas and the reporting hasn’t made as much progress. I do think this is one area that could use some improvements.

An FP&A Dream Tool

I will always recommend Adaptive to FP&A professionals. Once you use it and truly understand it, I'm sure you will do the same. There is little wonder why they are a leader in the SaaS space.

Pros

A cloud-based tool that enables you to forecast and budget different scenarios. OfficeConnect (an add-on feature) allows you to create reports directly in Excel and increases overall team efficiency.

Cons

Setting up Adaptive Insights is a crucial, timely, and difficult process. However, the time you put into building your instance initially saves time and pays dividends in the future.

Sophisticated, but slow software

The actual forecast model is very nice, but I wish the software could be more user-friendly, and faster.

Pros

Adaptive Planning is very sophisticated. There are so many ways models can be created, and it supports so many different versions which I love. I can create a forecast for every single GL account for every different department of the company.

Cons

First, the software is very slow for a company at around 1000 size. If you make even a slight forecast/formula update, it can take 30mins to an hour before you can start using it again. Also, the formulas are very difficult to learn. The formula assistant feature definitely helps, but the way the formula is structured, it's almost impossible to use without the assistant.

Adaptive User

excellent tool for forecasting, budgeting and reporting

Pros

Very easy to use and set up as well, also easy to able to be deployed across the business and user training required is minimal.

Cons

to start with it is cloud based and very easy to begin with

Adaptive Insights impresses even more than expected

Pros

Our employees were used to working with Excel spreadsheets. We considered such an approach not completely effective, so our choice turned next to Adaptive Insights. There are no restrictions on the size of the documents. This program is synchronized with other applications, including such important for us solutions like SAP and Oracle. We like the high accuracy of the reports we can create on the tool’s base. It is also important that all data are in one place and don’t require much effort for their processing and analysis. Adaptive Insights is a multifunctional tool with a robust and well-thought-out suite of features. This application allows our employees to track finances, budgets, sales, resources, and labor contribution. With its help, our company’s managers are also able to collect divergent data, make various kinds of reports, build models, and make optimal business decisions.

Cons

It would be better if Adaptive Insights had an opportunity to filter for specific months while working with spreadsheets. This lack of functionality makes our work a bit confusing sometimes. We wouldn’t mind adding more advanced features to the planning tools as well. We believe it would behoove this product if it had several tutorial videos on how to use it to the full extent. Even though we find this tool user-friendly, it doesn’t mean at all that it is so for every company.