Forecasting in the cloud, without Excel

A profile of Adaptive Planning.

If you’re trying to forecast next year’s revenue but find yourself drowning in Excel worksheets it might be worth looking at a dedicated forecasting and budgeting tool. This used to mean investing in an expensive server to run a database for analysis of company finances, but cloud-based alternatives have now started to emerge.

Adaptive Planning claims to be the first cloud-based tool of its kind, sitting between Excel at the lower end and SAP, Oracle and IBM in the enterprise. The starting price is $3,500 a year for three users with configurations depending on the type of users and the length of the contract.

BoxFreeIT spoke with Greg Clarke, CEO of ABM Systems, Adaptive Planning’s distributor and reseller in Australia, about the merits of Adaptive Planning and its use for forecasting by small and medium businesses.

BoxFreeIT: How well-established is Adaptive Planning?

Greg Clarke: The company was founded in 2003 by a frustrated accountant who thought there should be better ways of doing budgeting than in Excel. It went on sale in 2006 and now has 1000 customers globally with well over 20,000 users in 32 countries.

BoxFreeIT: What type of customers do you have in Australia?

Clarke: There’s definitely a higher utilisation of the technology in the SME (market). There’s about 40 customers in Australia, including Thiess, James Cook University, Rheem, Siemens and Phillips. The NSW Department of Housing is our largest customer.

Companies that are under 30 people in size would probably prefer cobbling things together in Excel. Once you get to a level of complexity in a business it would look for systems of this type.

BoxFreeIT: Which staff use it in a business?

Clarke: The buyer is the CFO, the accountant or the financial controller. They are the ones who have the pain points by doing forecasting in Excel without rigour, and it takes a long time. The users are the one to three people in the finance department and then each of the department heads and cost centre managers. In a small enterprise of 50 seats you might have half a dozen users.

Next page: What Adaptive Planning does better than Excel