New Consolidation Program and enhanced features highlight Adaptive Planning's cloud-based analytics suite

April 15, 2013 – Adaptive Planning, a cloud-based business analytics solutions for companies and nonprofits, has released Adaptive Consolidation, a new integrated cloud-based solution for comprehensive close-and-disclose financial consolidations and analysis.

The new product release extends Adaptive Planning’s leadership in business analytics, establishing the company as the first and only vendor to offer a complete, integrated cloud-based suite of products spanning corporate performance management (CPM) and business intelligence (BI). In addition to Adaptive Consolidation, the new release also includes significant enhancements to the company’s Adaptive Planning and Adaptive Discovery applications, demonstrating continued product innovation that empowers finance and management teams to automate budgeting, forecasting, reporting, consolidations, and data visualization.

With the introduction of this new solution, Adaptive Planning now provides the industry’s only complete cloud-based BI and CPM suite. Each of the company’s products – Adaptive Planning, Adaptive Consolidation, and Adaptive Discovery — is available both as part of the Adaptive suite, as well as on a standalone basis. Together, the suite of products offers a holistic solution that is even more powerful than the sum of its components.

Adaptive Consolidation addresses the need for enterprises to manage increasingly complex and changing business ownership structures across geographies and currencies and to consolidate across multiple different general ledger systems. According to a recent study of finance professionals conducted by the Business Performance Innovation (BPI) Network and Adaptive Planning, 84 percent of companies need to manage multiple business units, two-thirds have multiple geographic entities, and more than a third have merged and acquired businesses and deal in multiple currencies. More than 70 percent are not completely satisfied with their current consolidations process, and 58 percent would like to improve the accuracy and quality of data in their month-end consolidation and reporting process.

The Adaptive Consolidation solution introduces powerful new capabilities, coupled with an intuitive user interface, that make incredibly complex and time-consuming processes appear to be easy. Businesses can close their books accurately, quickly, and painlessly, with intuitive definition of rules that are automatically applied to the consolidation process each period. They can automate the import data that needs to be consolidated, as well as calculations for intercompany eliminations, minority interest, allocations, currency exchange and cumulative translation adjustment.

“We are seeing increasing importance placed on financial consolidation in the marketplace,” said Craig Schiff, president and CEO of BPM Partners. “Over the past year, many projects, even those ostensibly focused on budgeting, added some consolidation functionality to their requirements. In some cases it was driven by the need for intercompany matching and eliminations, in others it related to currency conversion and partial ownership, and for some it involved the ability to make journal entries in their performance management system. Adaptive Planning’s design and user experience is elegant and intuitive, and the allocations capability could be a huge improvement over both Excel and older enterprise software applications. ”

“At Adaptive Planning, we work with organizations of all sizes, from nonprofits to midsized companies to large enterprises, across the globe,” said John Herr, CEO of Adaptive Planning. “As such, our customers are increasingly facing complex business scenarios, including multiple currencies, multiple departments, and multiple ownership structures that require the robust consolidation features that our new product offers. We’re particularly proud that the design point of Adaptive Consolidation leapfrogs existing solutions, featuring numerous different design touches that embrace the ‘consumerization of enterprise software,’ and making the application a great fit for a large, global user base.”

A key element illustrating the new design of Adaptive Consolidation is the robust, flexible, and visually intuitive Process Tracker, which provides easy ways to define and monitor one-time and repeating processes. Users can define specific deliverables, assign them to users, monitor their status, and track their closure. With its leading-edge visual impact, rich functionality, simple usability, and ease of management, it will be the “must-have” among task and process management tools.

Adaptive Consolidation Process Tracker Screenshot:

Adaptive Consolidation includes simple setup and intuitive definition of rules that are automatically applied to the consolidation process each period. The product features out-of-the-box, seamless integration in the cloud with planning and visual discovery capabilities. Adaptive Consolidation offers immediate results with no waiting for jobs or processes, and speedy, integrated validations that instantly highlight any issues.

The new product includes the ability to partition financial data by data source, enabling users to identify data by the system or consolidation activity from which it originates, control access to that data, and isolate the effects of consolidation processes into designated compartments. These compartments all roll up into a “single source of truth” for all financial figures.

With this application, companies will be able to:

Achieve faster and more accurate close and reporting cycles, with greater transparency
Improve visibility, audit, and control during financial consolidations
Easily define elimination & allocation rules with a user-friendly interface for finance and accounting
Enhance flexibility with date-effective rules for eliminations and allocations
Perform what-if scenario planning with version-specific rules and ownership percentages
Comply with IFRS and GAAP requirements to report ownership changes when and as they occur
Provide clear and accurate view of financial results
Accelerate reporting cycles to internal and external stakeholders

A number of new features included in the new Adaptive Consolidation solution are also available as enhancements to the to the Adaptive Planning solution for budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and analysis, including a new Allocation Manager, enhanced currency support, and new options for managing versions.

The new Allocation Manager streamlines the process of reassigning values from one part of an organization to others. It eliminates the substantial time and complexity typically required for allocations using Excel or enterprise applications. Adaptive Planning’s new Allocation Manager has an intuitive interface designed to facilitate the creation of balanced allocations based on source and target departments and accounts, and an allocation method (e.g., Square Feet, Number of Employees, Percent Ownership, etc.). This provides a way for businesses to easily distribute shared costs to consuming departments, or to allocate P&L items to product lines or brands.

The new release also delivers numerous usability advancements for Adaptive Discovery administrators and end users, including enhancements to make it easier than ever to create dials to compare versions and a new Table Settings Editor to configure the display of table dials.

The new releases of Adaptive Planning and the Adaptive Consolidation solution are both currently available.