Budgeting Software Journal

Alight LLC, developers of Alight Planning financial planning software and the Planning Maturity Curve, today announced a strategic alliance with Proformative, the resource for corporate finance, accounting, and treasury. Proformative members will have expanded access to Alight’s resources in 2012 including best practices for Agile Planning which is quickly becoming the most important activity for Finance teams in the 21st century. [Read more →]

Alight LLC, developers of Alight Planning financial planning and reporting software, today announced that Bates Technical College has achieved significant benefits by moving their manual, spreadsheet-based capital planning processes to Alight’s automated planning package. Bates is located in Tacoma, Washington. The college operates on three campuses, with over 600,000 square feet of classrooms, shops, meeting rooms, and offices. [Read more →]

Adaptive Planning announced that IntegraMed America (NASDAQ: INMD), a leading health care services company with annual revenue of $300 million, has successfully automated their budgeting and forecasting process using Adaptive Planning. In order to serve their clients, IntegraMed has developed a complex organizational plan comprised of over 30 legal entities, two charts of accounts, and multiple revenue recognition policies.  With the goal of adopting a more professional software solution than Excel, IntegraMed embarked on an extensive search of more than twenty applications, ultimately selecting Adaptive Planning based on its ease of use, flexibility, and cloud-based model.

“The implementation process was very smooth and the professional services team was incredibly helpful,” said John Kearns, Corporate Controller, IntegraMed.  “We were able to go live in just six weeks, which has allowed us to use the application more than we anticipated. Our Adaptive Planning solution has over 200 plans, is just as flexible as Excel, and offers far better control over the process.” [Read more →]

As 2011 draws to a close, it is a good time to take a look at the last twelve months and adopt resolutions for 2012. At the turn of the year, many companies review the efficiency of existing business processes and the IT tools they require. arcplan, a global business intelligence (BI) expert, points out the goals companies should set for themselves when it comes to BI in 2012 if they want to focus on optimizing business processes and improving decision-making. [Read more →]

Alight LLC, developers of Alight Planning financial planning and reporting software, today announced that it has joined Oracle’s partnership program at the Gold level. As the leader and industry spokesperson for budgeting and enterprise planning solutions, Rand Heer, Alight’s CEO was delighted to be selected as an Oracle Gold Partner. Rand, who founded Pillar, the first enterprise planning software package, reflects on some important history to frame this partnership, “In 1994, Hyperion acquired Pillar. With over 2,500 customers purchasing Hyperion Pillar, the deal proved to be one of the great cash cows of the decade. Ironically, though in 2007, Oracle acquired Hyperion and finally killed Pillar which was replaced with Hyperion Planning. Some Pillar users did not make the move to Hyperion Planning including Apple Computer which is still using Pillar at the time of our partnership because Pillar had some beautiful functionality especially around unit rate amounts.” [Read more →]

Alight LLC, developers of Alight Planning financial planning and reporting software, today announced that Rand Heer, an industry spokesperson for budgeting and enterprise planning solutions and Alight CEO, will keynote multiple rolling forecast trainings and workshops detailing how companies can quadruple the ROI of financial planning and analysis.

“I am pleased by the positive reception of the Planning Maturity Curve that we introduced earlier in 2011. The market is seeing a massive shift from software solutions designed only to streamline the annual budget and save time with automated reports to a sharp focus on continuous planning and rolling forecasts. The Planning Maturity Curve helps you measure the ROI of planning activities and in almost all cases, we conclude that the action and excitement right now is in agile planning which is characterized by driver-based planning, integrated actuals, and scenario analysis,” Heer said. “The presentation takes the materials I developed last year to the next level and retains its educational focus on the core processes required to make planning a value-add activity. Most importantly, we’re seeing that by leveraging driver-based planning and integrating actuals at the right level of detail into the financial plan, it can be easy to implement agile planning and introduce best practices such as a rolling forecast.” [Read more →]

Alight LLC entered into a partnership with Scope Systems, a global leader of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Reporting solutions to the mining and mining services industries based in Perth, Australia. The partnership between Alight and Scope Systems is designed to provide mining companies with planning and financial reporting systems that complement traditional ERP systems. [Read more →]

PlanGuru announced the launch of PlanGuru 2011, a complete rewrite of their budgeting and forecasting software package.  Thousands of businesses, non-profits and financial professionals have used previous versions of PlanGuru to build more accurate budgets, plans and forecasts in a fraction of the time that it takes in spreadsheet software.  PlanGuru 2011 carries on that tradition by being significantly more powerful and intuitive, while maintaining a simple, low pricing structure. PlanGuru 2011 can be used in a myriad of ways: from entrepreneurs building a high-level forecast for the bank, to large organizations building multi-departmental operating budgets.  The consolidation feature in PlanGuru allows for budgeting an unlimited number of departments and an unlimited number of tiers within a hierarchy. [Read more →]

Alight LLC and Ralph Harker Associates formed a strategic partnership to deliver a budgeting, reporting and planning solution customized for higher education. Dr. Andrew Harker, president of Ralph Harker Associates and director of Budget Management at Stanford University, worked with Alight to co-develop best-practice planning models. After working with dozens of small and large institutions of learning, Harker and the Alight team identified tuition planning, endowment modeling, and personnel planning as three key areas that were ripe for standardization and best practice solutions. Higher education finance and budget departments can now leverage the hard work that went into standardizing these models to immediately streamline and improve planning processes. [Read more →]

The finance team at SightLife, one of the premiere eye banks in the world, is expanding the use of Alight Planning to move across the Planning Maturity Curve and make the move to Agile Planning.

Working with surgeons in over 30 countries, SightLife restores sight to more than 20 men, women, and children each day. This is accomplished through eye banking, which is the recovery and placement of eye tissue used in cornea transplants. As a nonprofit organization, SightLife needed a planning system that could handle sophisticated driver-based modeling. Jeanette Wilcox, Director of Finance at SightLife, remarked, “Donors and tissue have a shelf life measured in days, so we have to capture timing assumptions. The key driver for us begins with the number of donors, but then we adjust the volume via a transplant rate as not all corneas are transplantable. Then we have to break the model into four different areas to analyze a percentage of transplantable corneas that are shipped to a surgeon while breaking out the shipments into domestic and International since each has unique pricing models. We had already looked at several other budgeting software solutions that just didn’t seem to have the unit-rate-amount structure we needed to model out the revenue model which is highly driver-based. Alight took the time to really understand our planning objectives and confirm success even before we made the purchase.” [Read more →]