Transaction Reporting & Analysis

Companies can improve their corporate performance management with tight integration of transaction-level detail from other enterprise applications, and Adaptive Planning’s powerful yet easy-to-use reporting and analysis capabilities.

Overview

Effective corporate performance management – including annual budgeting, rolling forecasts, variance analysis, and what-if scenarios – requires tight integration with multiple systems. These typically include the General Ledger (GL), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application, Human Resource (HR) system, and other elements of the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Companies can improve their corporate performance management by automatically bringing transaction-level detail from these systems into Adaptive Planning.

Adaptive Planning customers can import and store transaction data, and drill down into it from sheets and reports. The drag-and-drop report builder allows users to create sophisticated reports with ease, without depending on IT. The ability to report on transaction detail can help managers and administrators analyze, understand, and explain actual data. They can make better, faster business decisions through fast, secure, and centralized access to detailed, accurate information. They can also use this information to drive more accurate budgets and forecasts.

For example, during a re-forecast cycle, a budget manager looking at a budget-versus-actual report notices that travel expenses have been running higher than budget. He clicks on some of the actual figures, and sees all of the underlying transactions. He quickly understands that his staff has been traveling more than planned, and that hotel and airfare costs per trip are higher than what he budgeted. After discussing options with his staff, he decides to conduct more meetings remotely, using the latest internet meeting technology, instead of traveling for every meeting. He implements a plan to cut travel costs, and re-forecasts accordingly.

This capability can make budget managers more autonomous and efficient in understanding their actual data and budget variances, and can free finance and accounting for higher value-added activities. In addition to improved decision-making, it can also result in reduced budgeting, forecasting, and reporting cycle times, because companies have all of their actual and plan data available in one centralized application.

Benefits:

• Improve corporate performance management with tight integration of data between systems
• Make budget managers more autonomous and efficient with self-service tools
• Free finance for higher-value added activities
• Make better-informed decisions more quickly
• Reduce budgeting, forecasting, and reporting cycle times

Features:

• Flexible, drag-and-drop field definition
• Customer-designated fields
• Multiple automated import options
• Flexible import frequency, e.g., monthly, daily or weekly
• Easy access to transactions from sheets and reports
• Easy drag-and-drop creation of reports for analysis

How It Works

Administration

Administrators with the appropriate permission can define the fields used to categorize transactions. They can create and modify transaction field definitions, and they can monitor the number of transactions in the model, transaction date ranges, and the date and user who has performed the last transaction import.

The Transaction Field Definition Editor has an easy-to use drag-and-drop interface. Administrators can define fields including date, amount, account, organization (e.g. department, region) and any custom dimension used elsewhere in the model (e.g., product, customer, vendor). In addition, administrators can define custom transaction types, such as Invoice, Purchase Order, Journal Entry, etc.

Transaction Import and Management

Transaction detail can be imported using all of the Adaptive Planning options for integrating with other enterprise systems, located either on-premise or in the cloud:

• Flat file
• Adaptive Planning Connector for on-premise or cloud-based applications
• Web services APIs

Transactions can be imported for several months at once, or one month at a time, or throughout a month in batches, e.g., every week during the month.

Administrators have several options for managing transactions, including specifying a date range and transaction types for deletion of transactions, and re-importing transactions. In the definition editor, fields can be modified, added, or deleted at any time.

Transaction Reporting & Analysis

Once the transactions have been imported into Adaptive Planning, users with the appropriate permission can drill into this data on sheets and reports.

When a user is viewing actual data on a sheet or report, clicking on a cell takes the user to a detailed report of all transactions contributing to the actual value. Users can also create transaction reports which can be filtered by specific criteria, such as date ranges and transaction types.

Adaptive Planning’s drag-and-drop report builder puts powerful yet easy-to-use web-based reporting in the hands of finance, budget managers, and executives. Reports are easy to create, fast to run, and always reflect up-to-the-minute, real-time data. Users need no special skills or programming experience to quickly create reports that pull transaction detail from a centralized database, sort and subtotal across multiple dimensions, and view the output in a variety of ways.

For additional information, please see the Adaptive Planning Licensing & Editions page.