Agile financial planning

Adaptive Planning has announced what it describes as a major product release that delivers new features for reporting, application management and data integration. The company claims that V. 7.0 enhances the overall value of the Adaptive Planning solution, providing additional capabilities that enable finance and management teams that are hamstrung by spreadsheet-based planning and reporting to successfully manage their businesses.

Available both on demand and on premise, Adaptive Planning 7.0 allows finance leaders and management teams to make better-informed decisions, execute with agility and discipline, and ultimately improve competitiveness.

Adaptive Planning 7.0 also introduces new features that enhance modeling and administration. The formula builder now includes capabilities for validating business logic, as well as new mathematical functions. And the administration user interface has been upgraded to allow for drag-and-drop administration of account, plan and dimension trees, which improves overall usability. Adaptive Planning’s import capabilities streamline this process, enabling finance users to extract data from GL, payroll, CRM and other systems; map it into appropriate accounts; and use it as the basis for variance reporting, scenario analyses, sales planning and financial re-forecasting.

The new version includes enhanced data integration capabilities, with a new Web services API that allows direct access to full import and export of all types of data, as well as greater control over filtering, currency and permissions. Further, by accessing the APIs through the Adaptive Planning Connector, users can now achieve complete, automated integration with a wide variety of back-office systems.

The company claims its report builder allows business users of all types to create sophisticated multidimensional reports via a drag-and-drop interface, in a far more powerful, flexible and easy to use manner than is possible when creating reports and analyses within spreadsheets.