Save content
Have you found this content useful? Use the button above to save it to your profile.
AIA

Beat the downturn with Adaptive Planning's Recession Survival Kit

by
24th Oct 2008
Save content
Have you found this content useful? Use the button above to save it to your profile.

Where most software companies are content to publish whitepapers telling customers and prospects how to survive in the downturn, online software provider Adaptive Planning has launched a recession-busting planning/budgeting kit. John Stokdyk reports.

Adaptive's Recession Survival Kit is a bundled 10-seat package for the company's Enterprise edition priced at £5,000 for the first six months. The web-based application supports budgeting, forecasting, analysis and planning with business modelling and workflow tools. It includes driver-based, integrated financial statements for income, balance sheet and cash flow planning and collaborative templates to help planners collect data for sales, expense and capital forecasts.

The sales template, for example, will let companies poll their sales teams for up-to-the-minute pipeline projections.

The Recession Kit package will include the full software but 7-day configuration sequence will deal with on immediate issues, said Adaptive Planning CEO Bill Soward.

"It focuses on where people need to go with emergency planning exercises to figure out how they should play next few months and 2009. This will give them an organised way to do that and let plan around different sales volumes, expense models and spending assumptions to see how they will affect cash flow," he said.

"Everyone is going back and looking at how they want to play the business going forward. To do that you need to get everybody on the same page, create different scenarios and get people locked down about the changes that need to be made, and how to make them."

The company's rapid response to the recent financial meltdown is a clever way to emphasise the flexibility and speed of development that is possible with software as a service systems. It also gives Adaptive an opportunity to flag up the shortcomings of Excel and other "do-nothing" approaches to corporate planning, Soward told AccountingWEB this week.

"Rumours about the death of Excel have been greatly exaggerated," he said. "Our numbers show that 76% of businesses still do budgeting and planning in Excel. It's a great desktop productivity tool designed for an audience of one. Lots of companies start out doing financial reporting in Excel, and that's fine."

But as companies grow and conditions change on the ground, there is more need to collaborate and get stakeholders involved in planning and reporting. "Once you get to 100+ employees, store and forward of Excel sheets is a pretty crude way to run your business, which is when prods like ours become effective," Soward said.

While many software companies have strugged in recent months, Adaptive Planning has had a spectacular year and has tripled its user base in the UK. At the beginning of the year when the company set out to expand internationally, Soward admitted the system was still "pretty lame" at reporting.

"With all the other rival systems out there, CFOs are pretty savvy about what they need and there were certain features we needed to get into the game. Once we added drag-and-drop reporting, our international business started accelerating," he said.

The social networking features announced earlier this year have not had as much impact, he admitted, but the priority for Adaptive Planning now is to respond to customer and partner demands for international reporting formats, language transations facilities and multi-dimensional reporting.

"We don't use OLAP technology. We're working on a multi-dimensional import process so that users can bring in data ranges for planned versus actual comparisons in an audited way. If they want to do multi-dimensional analysis, we to give them a way so that non-trained people can compare things like products by class and region in a very straightforward, drag-and-drop way," Soward said.

These new facilities are due to appear in the company's December update. "We have a target of new releases with significant enhancements every 4-6 months. That lets us make steady progress and meshes well with customers' ability to digest the new features," he added.

"Our short development cycle means we can innovate rapidly, which is why we're winning."

Tags:

Replies (0)

Please login or register to join the discussion.

There are currently no replies, be the first to post a reply.