Products / Modeling & Administration
The foundation of the Adaptive Planning solution is its collaborative modeling environment, which makes it easy for individuals within companies to set up and work with the underlying financial model. The intuitive, spreadsheet-like interface enables users to revise formulas, change assumptions, enter new data, and add metrics by pointing and clicking. Adding a department or division, changing headcount, or adjusting expense allocations is effortless. And with a Get Started Wizard for first-time users, moving from Excel to an automated performance management solution has never been easier.
Adaptive Planning also provides sophisticated administrative features that enable finance departments to manage the way that models are created and structured, and to control permissions and access rights by end users throughout the company. These administrative features also allow creation and management of multiple versions, facilitating analysis of historical performance as well as creation of rolling forecasts and evaluation of what-if scenarios.
Benefits:
- Easily build, modify, and maintain financial models—without requiring IT experts
- Customize data entry sheets for end-users—without creating consolidation headaches for finance
- Simplify calculations using pre-built formulas for revenue recognition, depreciation, and other common calculations
- Create driver-based plans for greater accuracy and integrity
- Make rapid changes to the model via centralized rules, assumptions, and formulas
- Control user permissions and access rights
- Automatically manage and compare versions
- Support rolling forecasts and what-if analyses
- Avoid lengthy data integration processes
Features:
- Department Trees. Easily create, modify, and delete departments or cost centers. The P&L, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow statements are all automatically updated to reflect tree changes, as are previously created reports.
- Chart of Accounts. Enable users with appropriate permissions to add or remove accounts at any time, automatically propagating them throughout the model. Accounts can include financial and operational data and key performance indicators.
- Data Collection & Presentation “Sheets”. Centrally manage the layout of each department’s data entry sheets. Add or remove accounts, customize the look of each sheet, create complete financial statements as well as operational planning sheets.
- User-Based Access Controls. Allow the administrator to designate who has access to which data, ensuring information is securely shared only with the appropriate users.
- Assumptions. Create assumptions centrally and then use them in formulas within any department or account, allowing for consistent modeling assumptions across the company.
- Dimensions. Utilize dimensions to provide custom filters for categorizing and analyzing actual and plan data, allowing users to view data or include it in formulas in multiple ways, such as sales by product or region, or employee salaries by salary grade.
- Patterns. Leverage powerful, pre-defined sheets that spread data over a defined period of time and enable powerful planning functions such as automated revenue recognition, invoicing, and depreciation calculations.
- Central Formula Creation and Maintenance. Establish centralized formulas in order to easily modify accounts across the model.
- Multiple Currencies. Allow any subplan to plan in its own currency, and then rollup in the currency of its parent plan.
- Version Creation & Management. Create unlimited versions of the model by copying an existing version. Centrally control which version users are working in. Lock down versions once complete to prevent unwanted changes. Create versions that only finance staff can see or edit to evaluate confidential scenarios such as a reduction in force or new acquisition
- Wizard-Driven Integration. Streamline the process of importing disparate financial, operational, and personnel information from GL, ERP, CRM, HRIS or other enterprise applications into the system with import wizards.
- Historical Data in a Forecast. Incorporate historical data into a forecast to view several months of historical data combined with several months of forecast data.
- Account & Department Mapping. Map GL codes to the planning chart of accounts and planning department tree, ensuring apples to apples variance analysis. Changes in the underlying GL account structure or department tree will automatically be flagged during subsequent imports.
- Get Started Wizard. Take advantage of an automated, step-by-step guide that walks new users through the first-time process of setting up their companies’ financial models. The wizard makes it easy for companies to transition from Excel and get up and running with customized plans in Adaptive Planning in a matter of hours.