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Adaptive Planning builds social networking into budgeting tools

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4th Jun 2008
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Adaptive Planning, the hosted online budgeting and planning system, has gone a step further this month by adding collaboration tools and "Web 2.0" interactive communities to its financial planning processes. John Stokdyk reports.

Introduced on 2 June, the Adaptive Planning 5.0 release included new components for business modelling and dealing with allocations, but these features are likely to overshadowed by the collaborative features, which bring elements of social networking sites into the budgeting system. The new enhancements include private discussion forums, online document stores and project tracking tools.

Links are included to external pages where Adaptive Planning customers can their experiences and access best practice advice from other users.

Adaptive Planning CEO William Soward set the tone by explaining that budgeting, planning and reporting is less about a software application than a "communication process that flows back and forth".

He continued: "The people involved, the documentation, the responses to reports and explanations are out there and part of the process, but no one connects it into the budgeting and planning. To take the organisation to the next level, you need a real time commications system."

Rather than letting users put "a little note in cell C12", Adaptive Planning set out to create a complete commuty-based approach. So the new system includes private spaces where people can collaborate around parts of process in a secure way to build on the organisation's collectvie intelligenc, he said. "As teams execute on the plan, that information is then used to update managers on what's happening."

It's a novel and headline-grabbing approach to one of the more fraught areas of financial management. But Soward denied that the company was being too idealistic in trying to appropriate Web 2.0 techniques. "We try to remain grounded in reality - our data says there's a generational thing so that people in their 30s are more likely to do it than people in their 40s and 50s. And we don't talk about blogs and wikis, but of getting internal teams aligned. Rather than using 'star wars' technology, we talk about building in commentary that supports how a plan was made, and ways to explain the significance of the numbers," he said.

Finance recognises the importance of involving all stakeholders and of driving accountability to them, but was limited by the lack of collaborative tools. "Finance people want to bring internal stakeholders into their processes and to get information from their peers, for example to test assumptions about their plans," Soward said.

"They like the idea of sharing, but don't like anarchy, so we've created a continuum of capabilities to let them do that in secure private, semi-private and public spaces."

Based in California, Adaptive Planning brings a breath of fresh air to a market that is dominated by megavendors such as IBM, SAP and Oracle on the one hand, and tools such as Sage Financial Forecasting and Rugged Logic at the other end.

Soward says that Adaptive Planning is focused on bringing "collaborative financial managment, budgeting and planning" to companies between those two camps in the $10m-$500m turnover bracket. The application is a browser-based, on demand program, paid on an annual subscription basis and is beginning to percolate through European organisations such as the online HR and recruitment company Stepstone.

"The problem we're trying to solve is where customers have been doing budgeting and planning in spreadsheets. As they grow into multiple units and change business models, that application doesn't scale too well," he said.

"No one is really satisfied when it's in Excel. Our customers want to be extremely collaborative and capture information and compare against actuals very rapidly in a way that synchronises across the organisation. Our point in life is to provide a simple affordable solution that does not require extra IT resources."

Excel is not going to go away and is good at what it does, Soward admitted. For example, until the latest release, Excel has been the main way of moving data in and out of Adaptive Planning. New native tools will take up more of the data import/export workload and the company will introduce yet more translation and validation tools in its next update.

"Excel is not enterprise tool for budgeting, planning and reporting financials in a collaborative way and it forces you store and forward models using email," Soward explained. "With an on-demand application like ours, you make a change and it's replicated across the the organisation - so you can have a fully integrated income statement at deptartmental level that outputs to the balance sheet, cashflow and headcount reports. All of these things are integrated together in once piece - it's a whole different ballgame."

As well as enabling online collaboration, the software as a service approach also lets customers try before they buy and brings rapid paybacks, he added.

"We can set up the application very quickly and then you're in business. The time to value is days or weeks rather than longer." As well as being easier to implement, online applications required no extra IT management resources. To introduce version 5, Adaptive Planning was taken down at the weekend and everybody had the new version on Monday morning. "There's no need to schedule an update - it just happens for users," said Soward.

A free Express Edition is available for small companies and teams that supports basic expense and revenue planning and reporting. The prices for fuller corporate implementations are available on request from the company's website.

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