75%
of effort is wasted re-keying and manually rolling up data
90%
of spreadsheets contain data and formula errors
90%
of users are convinced they are error-free
Source: ACCA
If you feel your time could be better invested, you're not alone. Businesses are demanding more from their financial planning and analysis teams, and at a faster pace. Dealing with a large number of Excel spreadsheets means you don't have the time or agility to spend on analyzing performance. It's also difficult to quickly adjust models to reflect changing assumptions and conditions. One "small" change requires a waterfall of updates consuming hours, days, or even weeks.
Common spreadsheet pitfalls
Endless days and sleepless nights
Things that should be simple take a long time. Daily tasks and requests from your team or manager often mean long nights, some weekends, and never getting to do the things you'd like to get done.
The dangers of wrong or outdated data
Cobbling together spreadsheets can be a shaky foundation for making strategic decisions. Errors happen along the way due to lack of version control or last-minute updates. Often, no one trusts the numbers and decisions take longer than they should.
Do any of these sound familiar? You're not alone. Everyone has a spreadsheet horror story.
Imagine a planning process that lets you focus on the right things
You spend so much time in manual drudgery that you never get to the analysis you want to do. Imagine spending your time collaborating with business managers, analyzing your models through dashboards and scorecards, and adding more value to the business. To get there, you need a faster financial modeling process that meets three criteria. It has to be collaborative, comprehensive, and continuous.
Collaborative
- Engage finance and business owners across the organization with ease of use
- Empower adoption with self-service capabilities
- Spend more time analyzing your model instead of creating it
- Always work with real-time data
- Drag-and-drop report building features
- Have confidence that everyone is working in the same model version
Comprehensive
- Create dashboards that integrate your actuals and plan
- Easily manage models and forecasts across all integrated data sources
- Run flexible what-if analyses
- Access audit trails to see what changed, when, and who did it
- Easily account for multiple currencies, exchange rates, etc.
- Get business insights from real-time data
- Build board reports for senior management
Continuous
- Automate data consolidation from all sources
- Export operational data from GL, payroll, purchasing, etc.
- Collaborate with business partners
- Course-correct with more agility
- Run scenario plans in minutes
- Update reports with one click
- Use flexible modeling that lets you build on the fly and adjust dimensions as needed
When you have these three components, we call it "active planning"
Interested in learning more about software that enables active planning?
"Adaptive has removed the headaches we used to experience and seamlessly brought everything together in a way that facilitates cooperation and communication. The dynamic nature of adaptive makes it a very collaborative experience and it does a wonderful job at satisfying all of our forecasting, budgeting, and reporting needs. Adaptive saves us hundreds if not thousands of hours per year. This increase in efficiency results in cost savings north of $100k.".
Alex Humble, Financial Analyst
