Active Planning: Active planning is a dynamic and proactive budgeting process that is collaborative, comprehensive, and continuous. An active planning process provides greater visibility into business performance, builds confidence in the numbers, enables data-driven decisions, and increases buy-in and accountability throughout an organization. Active planning requires planning software that is easy, powerful, and fast. This is the opposite of static planning, which involves long planning cycles and limited analysis, and usually results in short-lived plans.

Attributes: Attributes group dimensions outside the confines of your standard hierarchies. You use attributes and attribute values to tag metadata from other parts of your model. You can tag attributes to: Levels, Accounts, Custom dimensions.

Bottom-Up Budgeting: Bottom-up budgeting is a budgeting method that starts at the cost center level, moving up to the top level. Each cost center within the organization is required to compile a list of the things it needs, the projects it plans to carry out in the next financial period, and cost estimates. The estimates of all the cost centers are then summed up to get the overall Division budget, and the Institute budget. The managers of each cost center are required to give their input since they know the cost estimates for the projects to be implemented. The Bottom-Up budget will serve as the foundation for forecasting and multi-year planning.

Calculated Accounts: Calculated accounts enable you to create formulas for general ledger, custom, cubed, and modeled accounts. Unlike shared formulas, calculated accounts calculate the value across all levels and all versions. Calculated accounts are ideal for consistent calculations, like net income.

Context Filter: Context filters allow for filtering the data that displays in the charts within a perspective.

Cube Sheets: Allow multiple dimensions such as level, fund or program and the data resides at the intersection of those dimensions.

Driver Based Planning: Driver-based planning, or driver-based modeling, is a method to planning and analysis (FP&A) focused on identifying an organization’s key business and value drivers and then creating business plans and budgets based on these key drivers.

Dashboards: Dashboards allow you to monitor and drive business performance for data-driven decision-making through self-service interactive visualizations, and charts in an easy-to-digest form.

Dimensions: Dimensions are logical categories with a list of values, for example, Region with the values North, South, East, and West. Dimensions are used on sheets to tag and view data in different groupings, such as headcount by job status, sales by product, or expenses by project. The tagged data can also be used to drive other data. For example, Headcount might be tagged with a dimension called Status with the values Full Time, Part Time, or Contractor. Salaries by Status could then be used to drive different benefit calculations. Dimensions can also be used to sort and filter data on reports and charts.

Excel for Planning: Excel functionality may be used to augment models and sheets in Adaptive Planning. Multiple tables and tabs are possible.

Formulas: Formulas automatically calculate data across accounts and sheets. As an end user, you enter formulas directly on your sheet cells.

Institute expense budgeting: Plan direct costs and allocate salaries and overhead across segments like colleges, schools, and departments. Budget owners have access to data with drill-down capabilities.

Manual Adjustments: Planners may create manual adjustments for overrides on certain fields.

Matrix Report: Matrix reports provide more flexibility, added dimensionality, and can include custom calculations. They can display information in a grid format to include variations, such as information displayed as nested grids or grids displayed for each group in the report.

Model Report: Model reports display information from Modeled Sheets and lack flexibility in reporting data other than what is available on the related sheet(s).

Modeling: Modeling is the process of simulating the effect of specific variables on a financial outcome to improve financial decisions. This is a critical part of driver-based planning, where the core elements of a business process are used to model and estimate the future performance of that business function.

Modeling Components: Modeling components reflect various aspects that are used to build plans. Every data point in your plan or model is at an intersection of the dimensions of your model: time, version, level, accounts, and any custom dimension you add to the model. You can use attributes to tag dimensions.

Levels: Levels are the key organizational units of a company. The levels represent departments, cost centers, profit centers, or geographical regions. An organization structure models the operations of your business, and the way data rolls up for planning and analysis purposes.

Shared Formulas: Shared formulas are the only system formulas that are displayed in editable cells on the sheet. You can edit or override them when you are entering data. They calculate general ledger and custom account values at specific levels and versions. Shared formulas are ideal for accounts that vary, like travel expenses, which use different formulas for various levels.

Permission Set: Permission Set is your security permission set which determines your access to functionality within the instance. Each permission set has enabled permissions which determine the type of tasks you can perform within the model.

Personnel Sheet: Modeled sheet that you can use to track and plan data for personnel. Feeds data in other sheets of your financial planning model including Bottom-Up Budgeting. Best suited more for the financial impact of personnel.

Perspectives: Perspectives group dashboards. Example: You can group dashboards by business unit, role, or by task. Perspectives have filters that provide contextual views of all the dashboards inside them.

Report Fields:

• All: All reports available to you
• Personal: Reports only available to you. You can share personal reports by saving the report to a shared folder
• Shared: Reports shared with you as a user, group you are a member of, or specific levels you have access to
• Favorites: Reports you marked as a favorite. Right-click any report or press Shift+F10 on your keyboard and select Add to Favorites
• Reusable: Reports available to build new reports

Scenario Planning: Scenario planning is a method of planning that analyzes the outcomes of a financial model based on the application of different circumstances to the model. Scenario planning is helpful in conducting what-if analyses and better understanding the sensitivity of a model to changing inputs or assumptions.

Sheets: Sheets provide the interface for managers and planners to view, enter, and update data, such as actuals and budgets or forecasts. The three sheet types are standard, modeled, and cube sheets.

Splits: Splits are rows created in a standard sheet that provide a useful way for users to enter additional detail or supporting calculations within an account.

Time: Time is used to define the start and end of a version, set the columns visible in standard sheets, create elements in reports, restrict import ranges, establish parameters for use in integration framework, and more.

Value: Value is not to be confused with numeric values; dimensions and attributes have individual values.

Versions: Plan versions and actuals versions represent the business scenarios you need to plan for. You can create as many plan versions as you want and create actual sub-versions. Example: A plan version might be a budget for next year.

Other Resources