Budgeting Software Journal

SoftLayer has achieved significant benefits by replacing their legacy budgeting and planning software with the Alight Planning solution. The full story was featured in a webinar earlier this month with the Institute of Management Accountants entitled: Case Study: Measuring the ROI of Planning Software. [Read more →]

PlanGuru announced the availability of its 2012 budgeting and forecasting software – an essential financial planning tool that enables businesses to improve their budgeting and financial projections. This business planning software solution can now be purchased or downloaded as a 30 day free trial. [Read more →]

Alight Planning, developers of the first solution to make driver-based planning easy, today announced the immediate availability of a new methodology for quantifying the return-on-investment (ROI) of implementing a dedicated budgeting and planning solution.

“This industry needs an ROI calculator, something tangible that finance teams can use to measure the effectiveness of their planning systems,” said Rand Heer, Alight Planning’s CEO. “I outline a framework for getting a handle on the ROI in my article How Agile is your Planning which was featured in a recent issue of Strategic Finance Magazine.” [Read more →]

PlanGuru announced the release of a new product, the Advanced Reporting Add-in for Microsoft Excel, as an add-on to it’s PlanGuru budgeting software. The new Advanced Reporting Add-in allows PlanGuru users to build flexible, custom reports through a simple Excel based interface. With the ability to integrate ratios, calculations, charts and other metrics into your reports, this financial reporting tool is perfect for professionals with unique reporting needs.

“Out of the box reporting solutions, no matter how good, are inherently flawed because they attempt to standardize an activity that should be unique to each user. Some reports and analyses can only be delivered through a custom reporting solution; the Advanced Reporting Add-In provides PlanGuru users with total discretion over their reports.”
- Taylor Wielage, Director of Application Development, PlanGuru [Read more →]

Alight Planning announced the surprising results of an informal survey conducted during the closing presentation of the GMI-Solutions FP&A training conference in San Francisco held earlier in February. Ben Lamorte, VP Marketing at Alight, introduced new material in his presentation entitled Financial Planning Innovations: Is it worth it to replace spreadsheets with a planning tool?

“Midway through my presentation,” said Lamorte, “I asked the group of about 50 attendees whether their management is prioritizing ‘streamlining existing processes to save time’, Type 1 benefits, or ‘introducing new processes that add business value’, Type 2 benefits. Earlier in the conference I spoke with one FP&A professional who reported, ‘We’re working on the hard benefits which can be measured by time saved; we’re also interested in soft benefits that cannot be measured such as improving decision making.’ This inspired me to conduct an informal survey of the audience about what type of benefits are most important to management. The surprising part was that every single attendee reported management prioritizes Type 2 over Type 1.” [Read more →]

Alight Planning announced that 2011 was the strongest year in the company’s history. The company nearly doubled its employee base to reflect a focus on industry-specific solutions, partner development, and the growing demand for planning that adds value throughout the year. Alight Planning posted significant revenue growth and introduced The Planning Maturity Curve, a framework for measuring the ROI of financial planning activities. [Read more →]

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 →]