It’s hard to react quickly to the ever-changing business environment. That’s why the most successful companies are those that have intensified their focus on planning. Managers in these companies establish budgets and forecasts, rigorously measure performance against these plans, evaluate alternative scenarios, take quick action based on informed decisions and re-forecast accordingly.

But most companies lack the tools to perform these essential activities consistently, and with quick turnaround. Managers who rely on Excel spreadsheets benefit from flexible modeling capabilities but lack structured processes and centralized data. Even after investing significant time and manual effort during the planning cycle, they often end up with errors. Meanwhile, managers who use enterprise business intelligence (BI) software do standardize their processes, but the software is often costly and complex to implement and use – far too resource-intensive for midmarket organizations.

The result is a solution gap for small and midsize companies. That’s why at least 80 percent of these companies continue to settle for Excel – and operate at a significant competitive disadvantage.

THE ADAPTIVE PLANNING ALTERNATIVE: BUDGETING, FORECASTING AND REPORTING MADE EASY

Adaptive Planning bridges this solution gap with a powerful yet easy-to-use budgeting, forecasting and reporting solution that is optimized for midsize companies. This solution combines the flexibility of spreadsheets with the structure and process of enterprise BI software. The Adaptive Planning suite includes:

• Budgeting and forecasting
• Dashboards, reporting and analysis
• Collaborative modeling
• Model and user management

To meet a wide range of needs, Adaptive Planning is offered in three editions, all of which are available both on-demand and on-premise:

• Express Edition: Designed for small companies and teams, this free, collaborative budgeting and forecasting solution supports basic expense and revenue planning.
• Corporate Edition: Designed for small and midsize companies, this full-featured solution includes all the features in Express Edition plus additional capabilities for budgeting and forecasting, reporting and analysis, and data integration.
• Enterprise Edition: Designed for midsize companies and divisions of larger corporations, this comprehensive solution includes all the capabilities in Corporate Edition plus features for managing more complex requirements on a greater scale.

INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGIES POWER AN EASY-TO-USE SOLUTION

By leveraging new business models and technologies including software as a service (SaaS) and open source, Adaptive Planning makes it easy to move beyond spreadsheets and improve performance through automated budgeting, forecasting and reporting. Adaptive Planning is:

• Easy to evaluate. It takes just 30 seconds to sign up and access the on-demand application. Take advantage of one-click download and install for the on-site version.
• Easy on the budget. Free versions of entry-level software are available, and full-featured commercial versions start under $500. In either case, no new hardware or software is required.
• Easy to customize. Start immediately with predefined Best Practices Planning Templates, or use the Get Started Wizard to create a company-specific plan in hours. For deeper customization, source code is available.
• Easy to use. Business user training takes less than 30 minutes, while power users typically require just two hours of training. The solution provides graphical dashboards and a familiar Excel-like user interface to minimize the learning curve.
• Easy for collaboration. Adaptive Planning enables a single version of the truth and provides one unified product for budgeting, forecasting, reporting and analysis.

OPTIMIZED FOR MIDSIZE COMPANIES

Adaptive Planning is more than an easy-to-implement, easy-to-use solution that delivers a low total cost of ownership. It is also the best solution for small and midsize companies because it is optimized for the way they do business. Adaptive Planning provides predefined templates to help small companies jump-start the planning process, and delivers the powerful modeling and key features that midsize companies need. Whether customers choose to deploy their solution on-demand or onsite, they will receive new releases on a quarterly basis.

In addition, Adaptive Planning is committed to being an excellent business partner for midsize companies – and it shows. Adaptive Planning boasts annual subscription renewal rates of over 90 percent, and is ranked among the top four vendors for customer satisfaction in a recent BPM Partners Pulse survey. AAA puts Adaptive Planning in the “top 1 percent of vendors we’ve worked with.” CUSTOMER TESTIMONIALS

“With Adaptive Planning, we’ve increased the efficiency of our planning process by 25 to 40 percent. Instead of sending spreadsheets across the organization, we can more easily collaborate because we have one designated budget file that’s under the control of our finance department.”
–Tom Clark, CFO, CollabNet

“Not only is the Adaptive Planning system user-friendly, but their customer service is unbelievable. Our support contact is like an extra member of our staff. She’s very responsive, always available and problems are always resolved quickly.”
–Buddy Johnson, CFO, DentalPlans.com

“Revising our plan within one day would have been impossible on our old spreadsheet system. With Adaptive Planning, every stakeholder could easily see where they needed to make adjustments to headcounts and revenue expectations.”
–Jeffrey Chalmers, Corporate Controller, SourceForge

“We needed a system that was easier to work with than most budgeting software tools. Adaptive Planning was by far the best budgeting tool we evaluated.”
–Michael Gonzales, Director of Financial Planning and Analysis, Healthways

“With Adaptive Planning, our managers have more than a budget tool – they can manage and guide business performance through monthly forecasts. But they only have to spend 20 minutes per month managing the monthly forecast.”
–Chris Dickson, Business Unit Controller, Med-Eng

• Affordable annual subscriptions
• No new hardware or software required
• Go-live in 2 to 6 weeks
• Minimal implementation resources required
• Automatic upgrades and updates
• 24x7 worldwide access

• Predefined sheets for planning personnel, expenses, sales and capital
• Automated consolidation across the organization
• Intuitive spreadsheet-like interface
• Self-service, multidimensional drag-and- drop reporting
• Customizable dashboards and charts
• Multiple currency support
• Dynamic business modeling and formula creation
• Unlimited version management
• User-specific sheets, reports and access controls

• Decrease budgeting time by up to 67 percent
• Reduce errors by eliminating spreadsheet manipulation
• Enable intuitive drag-and-drop reporting
• Facilitate rolling forecasts
• Provide dashboard views of key metrics
• Support flexible “what if” analyses
• Increase accountability of budget managers
• Integrate expenses, capital and personnel plans with revenue
• Use multiple revenue recognition models and invoice assumptions
• Plan and integrate all financial statements

FIND OUT FOR YOURSELF – TEST DRIVE IT TODAY!

If you’re ready to move beyond Excel and dramatically improve your financial management, the choice is easy – Adaptive Planning. Test drive Adaptive Planning today at: www.adaptiveplanning.com/testdrive.