Adaptive Planning Intros Financial Consolidation Software
Analytics provider Adaptive Planning has released Adaptive Consolidation, a cloud-based solution it says can help manage business ownership structures across geographies and currencies and consolidate across multiple different general ledger systems, a common and often vexing situation for enterprises.
According to a 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. Not only that, but 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 software includes an intuitive definition of rules that are automatically applied to the consolidation process each period. Users 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.
They can also partition financial data by data source, 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.
A feature called the intuitive Process Tracker offers 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.
A number of new features included in the new Adaptive Consolidation solution are also available as enhancements 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. According to the company, it cuts the time and complexity typically required for allocations using Excel or enterprise applications. Its intuitive interface facilitates the creation of balanced allocations based on source and target departments and accounts. 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 to create dials to compare versions and a new Table Settings Editor to configure the display of table dials.
Adaptive Consolidation, like the company’s other products, is available both as part of the Adaptive suite or on a standalone basis. the company says its software includes capabilities for budgeting, forecasting, reporting, consolidation, dashboards and business intelligence.
