MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwire - September 9, 2010) -  Adaptive Planning, the leader in on-demand financial planning and reporting solutions for companies of all sizes, today announced the availability of Adaptive Planning 7.0, a major product release that delivers new features for reporting, application management, and data integration. This release 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 manage their businesses with the agility and discipline required for success in today's demanding environment.

Historically, companies worldwide have managed their budgeting, forecasting, and reporting processes with spreadsheets, a largely manual approach notorious for being time consuming, error-prone, and non-collaborative. More recently, as the challenging economic environment has placed new demands on management teams, the limitations of spreadsheets have become even more apparent. Managers at all levels in an organization need to be able to establish plans, view business results in real-time, analyze underlying trends, evaluate multiple what-if scenarios, make informed decisions, take action, and re-plan accordingly -- all within a highly-compressed timeframe.

But for managers to be more agile, they need the support and leadership of finance -- which is nearly impossible to provide if the company relies upon manual, spreadsheet-based planning and reporting processes. In fact, a Q2 2010 survey of financial professionals conducted by Adaptive Planning and the BPI Network revealed that "planning, reporting, and analysis" represent the #1 challenge for finance organizations. But despite the significant pains, most organizations continue to rely upon spreadsheets because the traditional alternative, enterprise planning and reporting software, has been far too costly and time intensive to implement, and too complex for typical business managers -- those without deep financial and technical expertise -- to successfully use.

"Since the beginning, Adaptive Planning has been focused on providing a game-changing on-demand alternative to both Excel and traditional enterprise-class budgeting, forecasting, and reporting software," said William A. Soward, CEO of Adaptive Planning. "In today's challenging economic environment, our affordable, easy-to-use, and rapidly deployable solution has become the clear choice for business users in companies of all sizes. And now, with the new features in Version 7.0, we provide even more compelling value to the companies worldwide looking to improve their agility and competitiveness by moving beyond Excel."

Reporting & Analysis

Adaptive Planning's report builder allows business users of all types to create sophisticated multidimensional reports via an intuitive 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. The new reporting features in Adaptive Planning 7.0 include:

• Report Parameters. Report authors can create reports that allow report viewers to easily filter the report based on specific dimensions -- such as version, time period, department, geography, product line, or customer -- without having to modify the report in the underlying report builder. This feature makes it easier for report authors to create sophisticated, high-value reports that can be used successfully by non-experts throughout an organization. Automatically incorporating data privacy and permissioning logic, this feature simplifies broad-based report creation and streamlines analysis for centralized finance and executive teams.

• Report Segments. Report authors now have greater flexibility and control in defining the layout of reports, with the ability to specify multiple segments of data that are placed on each axis. This feature allows users to create complex and sophisticated reports that incorporate data of multiple types, from different versions and time periods, in a single exhibit, such as P&L statements that display revenue by product and expense by department.

• Enhanced Time Intelligence. Enhancements have also been made to the native management of time periods within the application. For example, users can now more easily report on and analyze month-, quarter-, and year-to-date information, create rolling twelve month reports, and together with Report Segments, incorporate and compare different time periods, such as current actuals by month against YTD plan and last year's YTD actuals.

These new capabilities represent significant improvements over the brittle Excel-based approach to reporting and analysis, which requires countless hours of manual data manipulation that must be repeated each time underlying data changes.

Application Management & Administration

As an enterprise application, Adaptive Planning offers management capabilities that are simply impossible in the tools-based, Excel model approach. By leveraging built-in capabilities such as a business-logic based modeling environment, user permissions, cell explorer and audit trail functionality, multiple currency support, and more, users can create and manage far more powerful and robust models that allow for more nimble decision making.

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.

Data Integration

In spreadsheet-based planning and reporting, incorporating real-time actuals data from back office systems in reports and analyses can be incredibly cumbersome and time consuming. 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 -- all at the click of a button.

Adaptive Planning 7.0 features 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.

By accessing the APIs through the Adaptive Planning Connector, customers can now achieve complete, automated integration with numerous back-office systems, including Great Plains, Lawson, MAS 90, MAS 500, Oracle Financials, QuickBooks, SAP, Solomon, and many others using SQL, ODBC, or flat file interfaces.

And the enhanced export capabilities allow customers and partners to more easily and intelligently incorporate forward-looking planning data into other applications, such as business intelligence applications.

Availability and Pricing

Adaptive Planning 7.0 is available immediately, as part of customers' existing subscription agreements, which start at $600 per user per year for Adaptive Planning Corporate Edition, and $800 per user per year for Adaptive Planning Enterprise Edition. For additional pricing details, please visit: http://www.adaptiveplanning.com/products/pricing.php

About Adaptive Planning
Adaptive Planning is the leader in on-demand budgeting, forecasting, and reporting solutions that streamline financial management, improve collaboration, and drive better business decisions in companies of all sizes. By offering affordable annual subscriptions and rapid implementations, and by eliminating the need for new hardware or IT support, Adaptive Planning makes it easy to move beyond spreadsheet-based processes without the cost and complexity associated with traditional business intelligence (BI) and business performance management (BPM) applications. Available both on-demand and on-premise, Adaptive Planning allows finance leaders and management teams to make better-informed decisions, execute with agility and discipline, and ultimately improve competitiveness. Adaptive Planning is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. and can be reached at 650-528-7500 or www.adaptiveplanning.com.

Contact Information:

Media Contacts:

Gabe Kaufman
GlobalFluency
650-433-4163