Adaptive Insights

Article Dean Dorton

At Massey Consulting, we pride ourselves in being able to provide our customers with solutions that improve their business and scale their growth. The products and solutions that we offer range from human capital management, time and expense, to budgeting and forecasting. The invaluable aspect about our solutions is that there is something for every type of business, no matter the size, industry, or budget.

We’d like to shine the spotlight on one of our top industry solutions for budgeting, forecasting and analyzing financials- Adaptive Insights. 

About Adaptive Insights

Adaptive Insights is the worldwide leader in cloud-based business analytics solutions for companies of all sizes. The company’s software as a service (SaaS) platform allows finance and management teams to work together to plan, monitor, report on, and analyze financial and operational performance.

With capabilities for budgeting, forecasting, reporting, consolidation, dashboards, and business intelligence, Adaptive Insights enables finance, sales, and other business leaders to make better, faster, more collaborative decisions that drive a true competitive advantage.

Adaptive Insights is used by over 1,700 organizations worldwide, from mid-sized companies and nonprofits to large corporations, and is the only provider of a cloud business analytics solution that gives you a 360-degree view of your organization’s performance- past, present, and future.

Recent Accomplishments

In December 2017, Adaptive Insights announced its achievement of two significant $100 million dollar milestones.  The company has crossed the $100 million revenue threshold, for the trailing 12 months, in addition to having $100 million in annual recurring subscriptions under contract. These triumphs are two highly recognized indicators of scale for successful SaaS companies.

“Massey Consulting recognizes the significant achievements that Adaptive Insights has accomplished recently and we are proud to call ourselves a partner. The relationship that we have had with them over this past year has been a phenomenal one, full of growth and strong collaboration,” said Philip Massey, President of Massey Consulting. “We look forward to expanding our clientele base with Adaptive Insights and working hard to continuously attain success through our partnership.

Some information above is from Adaptive Insights. To read their full press release, click HERE.

Article Dean Dorton

Watch the recorded webinar from Massey Consulting and Adaptive Insights to learn how you can transform your organization with active planning! Adaptive Insights is the worldwide leader in cloud-based planning and analytics for organizations and nonprofits of all sizes.
Adaptive’s software as a service (SaaS) platform allows finance and management teams to collaboratively plan, monitor, report on and analyze financial and operational performance. Massey Consulting is a referral partner and a solution provider of Adaptive Insights.

In this recording, you will learn how you can integrate your data from your ERP, CRM, HR or any other source systems to get a true picture of your forward-looking financials. You will also see how the Adaptive Insights solution allows your FP&A team to be agile and respond quickly to change in this dynamic driver-based software.

Follow up with Massey Consulting, the Adaptive Insights Partner in Raleigh, by clicking here to schedule your personalized demo!

Article Dean Dorton

Are you a finance executive at a for-profit company thinking about making the leap to a nonprofit organization? As the Wall Street Journal reported, some readjustment may be in order.

Reporting requirements are much stricter, and you’ll need to manage the expectations of major donors and your board. But the biggest difference between nonprofits and for-profits may be a lack of resources. Don’t expect the luxury of a large staff. Employees at nonprofits end up wearing many hats and playing numerous roles because there simply aren’t enough people.

Watch the webcast, “Elevate the Role of Finance in Your Nonprofit Organization”

Take BUILD, for example. The nonprofit, which helps high school students in under-resourced communities, found its finance team strapped for staff when its geographic scope, headcount, and budget grew 50% from 2015 to 2016. The organization wanted to minimize the addition of general operations personnel—so it turned to a modern finance solution.

“If we hadn’t implemented Adaptive Planning, we’d need one more FP&A hire just to gather data and write reports,” said Bill Souders, vice president of operations and data management at BUILD. “Our business is growing rapidly, both in size and complexity. Our ability to plan and analyze across the equivalent of 40 budget departments became untenable, and growth was one of the key drivers for putting Adaptive Planning in place. Already there’s light at the end of the tunnel—I’m no longer trying to synchronize and version control 40 spreadsheets without breaking them.”

User-friendly software eases burden of finance team

According to Souders, Adaptive Insights’ intuitive interface takes some of the load off BUILD’s finance team by allowing non-financial users to do many tasks themselves, like inputting data and creating reports, saving time and resources. “With a very small amount of administrative support, we’re already able to let all of our budget managers slice, dice, and drill down into the data,” Souders said.

BUILD is just one of many forward-looking nonprofits that are turning to modern finance tools. At Adaptive Insights, we’ve had the opportunity to work with more than 400 nonprofits, spanning categories from healthcare to children’s services and performing arts.

For instance, United Here Health (UHH), which provides healthcare benefits to union employees in the hospitality, food service, and gaming industries, has been using Adaptive Insights since 2014, when it migrated from its legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

“Before Adaptive, everything was coordinated by email,” said Bryan Schmidt, UHH controller. “There was no interface between the ERP and our budgets, so we had to do updates manually. Final budget adjustments took up to four hours to complete. Then it took three weeks to upload them into the ERP system.”

United Here Health eliminates 185+ spreadsheets

In short, it was tedious, time-consuming work for an organization with limited resources. But by automating its financial processes, UHH was able to replace more than 185 spreadsheets and 400 workbooks—and avoid bringing on a new hire. “Now we can produce financial statements within an hour once the financials are closed,” said Schmidt. “It’s almost instantaneous. We have more time to spend on analysis, and thanks to Adaptive, more confidence in the results.”

Another challenge nonprofits face is how to sustain their missions and visions for years into the future. Nonprofit leaders need to be able to evaluate the potential impact of financial decisions on a much more frequent basis than once a year. The Adaptive Suite helps nonprofit finance teams build scenarios to model plans and contingencies, as well as conduct frequent re-forecasting and scenario planning.

“We’re very dependent on philanthropic revenue, and now more than ever we need to make rapid decisions and turn on a dime to implement contingency plans if we need to,” said BUILD’s Souders. “Adaptive Planning lets us drill down into the data, slice and dice it, and perform what-if scenarios.”

Fast reporting to many audiences

As mentioned above, nonprofits also differ from for-profits in that they need to report results to multiple audiences who are investing their money in the mission and vision of the organization. These audiences include boards, donors, and even the government.

“We use Adaptive OfficeConnect every day to create presentations for our board of directors,” Schmidt said. “It’s been a godsend because we don’t have to re-format every report if we change something.”

Adaptive Insights’ reporting functionality helps nonprofits generate balance sheets and annual financial statements and streamline other regulatory filings. With drag-and-drop reporting across multiple dimensions, nonprofit finance teams can track the performance of and get on-demand visibility into funds, projects, programs, departments, employees, and more.

Make smarter decisions, faster

“We can’t take a week just to gather and manipulate data into a form that everyone can understand,” Souders said. “Adaptive Insights lets us create reports a lot faster for any level of analysis we want. We can distribute data rapidly across the organization—not only for analysis but to help make final decisions about budgets and allocations.”

At the end of the day, cloud-based FP&A tools like the Adaptive Suite benefit not only the mission of the organization but the quality of life for its finance team.

“Because we didn’t have a single source of truth, I used to find myself poring over spreadsheets at 5:30 pm on a Friday night, looking for errors,” Schmidt recalled. “It was time spent that I didn’t have to spend. Now I can close the books in an hour—and I know it’s done right. People have been telling us that it’s the best budget they’ve ever seen.”

Permission to repost from Adaptive Insights marketing team.

Article Dean Dorton

They are becoming the CFO’s go-to source to ensure that finance runs smoothly and there are no surprises at the quarter end.

But leading a smoothly running finance department is a given. Today’s financial controllers must do more. They must be forward-looking. They must always be searching for ways to improve productivity, reduce costs, and streamline processes—including consolidation, the month-end close, management, and financial reporting. They must also scale these processes to handle high growth.

Navigating the financial obstacle course

Chances are that those added responsibilities don’t come with added resources. Outdated, disparate financial systems can’t provide finance leaders with the real-time information needed to adapt quickly to market changes. In addition to accurately stating results, reports must tell a story.

The good news is that many controllers have successfully met these challenges using financial analysis software, and in the process, have made themselves strategic business partners to the rest of the organization.

Let’s look at the six best practices that today’s best-in-class controllers follow.

1. Top controllers cut risk by cutting spreadsheets from their close.

The most effective controllers know that spreadsheets are the wrong choice for managing consolidation and close processes. These controllers are automating allocations, intercompany eliminations, data import from multiple ERP systems, and reclassifications.

They’re minimizing errors due to manual entry, creating standard, repeatable processes, and reducing risk. With the time they save by automating, they have more cycles for the strategic analysis they’re now expected to provide.

2. Top controllers use automation to close faster.

Despite the general expectation that companies should be able to close their books within a week, many organizations don’t achieve that goal for their quarterly or semiannual close. Most companies have a long way to go before they achieve a “virtual close,” in which fully integrated financial applications and ERP systems enable real-time financial statements, on demand.

The top controllers in today’s best run companies overcome these challenges by transforming processes altogether and making use of technology and people to maximize their efficiency. They streamline and automate key close tasks like consolidation and reporting with cloud-based applications. Because these applications reside in the cloud, they’re easier to deploy, use, and manage.

By automating processes and eliminating manual tasks, controllers can allocate their personnel to more value-added activities.

3. Top controllers lead with data and analysis to elevate their function beyond closing the books.

Increasingly, controllers are being asked to provide not only financial data but budget and operational information as well. They do more than simply compile packages of reports—they interpret the data and contribute to decision-making.

Best-in-class controllers automate their reporting processes with self-service tools so they can analyze data without needing a programming degree. They use visual analytics and scorecards to identify patterns in prior-period trends. Reports provide relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) and interactive dashboards that can be consumed across the entire organization.

4. Top controllers pursue a culture of self-service.

Even more efficient reporting doesn’t eliminate the fact that controllers are becoming de facto information sources for both financial and nonfinancial managers. According to the IMA, more than 90% of controllers are being called upon to provide operational data, and many are being used to source business performance and customer data.

The best understand that pulling reports for others takes them away from more value-added, strategic activities. So, to deal with the onslaught of requests, these people are enabling key stakeholders and business users with self-service reporting and dashboards.

5. Top controllers ensure a seamless handoff of consolidated financials to FP&A.

Top controllers deploy business systems that integrate budgeting, planning, consolidation, reporting, and analytics into a single application that can be used by both accounting and FP&A. In the Adaptive Insights CFO Indicator Q3 2015 report, 38% of the global CFOs survey respondents said their organizations had achieved a single source of truth, while 45% said they were working toward a central repository for financial performance data.

A single system makes it much easier to move from close to planning and analysis because everyone is aligned around the same data.

6. Top controllers enable collaboration among a decentralized team.

Finance departments are more decentralized now than ever before, but your accountants still need to collaborate around the close process. Centralized, hard-to-access systems stand in the way of collaboration, as do poorly defined schedules and weak commitments to deadlines.

The best controllers manage their distributed teams by carefully balancing leadership and project management. They create a consistent close schedule that reduces bottlenecks, minimizes surprises, and promotes a culture of unity. A consistent schedule also allows the team to deliver information more quickly.
Repost from Adaptive Insights.

Article Dean Dorton

Repost from Adaptive Insights

When it comes to your company’s chart of accounts, you can’t find a more elemental accounting function. Important? Yes. Sexy?

A chart of accounts provides a snapshot of your company’s financial health—how much money it has, owes, and spends. The most general categories are assets, liabilities, revenues, and expenses. More detailed business functions, projects, divisions, or locations are listed within those categories.

Your chart of accounts will be as complex and detailed as your company needs dictate. A small bookshop may have 50 accounts. A national healthcare company with many divisions and locations will have thousands of categories.

But not all chart of accounts are the same, and a well-structured one is the foundation of a healthy general ledger. A typical chart of accounts has two sections: balance sheet accounts and income statement accounts.

Chart of accounts, part 1: balance sheet accounts

The balance sheet accounts provide a comprehensive view of all the moving parts of your business. It will typically include assets, liabilities, and equity. Here’s a closer look at what that entails:

Assets

At a midsized company, assets that are being tracked might include:

Cash on hand (the balance of your business bank accounts)
Accounts receivable (money owed on pending invoices)
Value of current inventory
Physical property (such as owned office or factory space, vehicles, and equipment), minus the annual depreciation of such assets
Company-owned investments (company stock, investments in other funds)
Intangible assets (goodwill, intellectual property, etc.)

Each account can be listed separately with its own reference number. These assets may vary greatly based on the type and size of the company you’re working for. For instance, a large dairy farm may count 500 cattle (each identified with its own number), as well as a large barn, milking equipment, and feed in its “physical property.”

A software company, conversely, may have far fewer physical assets but much more valuable intangible assets: If the company has produced proprietary software code, that could be valued at millions of dollars, even if the company has minimal physical inventory beyond a few dozen MacBooks.

In ordering your assets list in your chart of accounts, your company should begin with the most liquid assets and list in order from there. Bank balances can be at the top of the chart, followed by inventory, then by short-term (easily liquidated) stocks and investments, accounts receivable (with each invoice separately numbered), and finally, physical property that you do not intend to sell (unless absolutely necessary to keep the business afloat). The visual display should help your financial team get a clear picture of what assets you have and how easily they can be leveraged.

Liabilities

The liabilities section refers to money that your business owes to others that hasn’t yet been paid. Some of the items you might list here include:

Bank loans for equipment and other expenses
Accounts payable to vendors
Payroll expenses (for hours worked but not yet paid)
Expenses for payroll taxes
Employee benefits expenses
Sales tax
Property tax

As with assets, this list should be structured in order of urgency—most likely, your finance team manages payroll expenses on a weekly or biweekly cycle and will resolve that debt on a regular basis. You might have a biweekly or monthly schedule for vendor payments; however, you may need to prioritize certain invoices over others based on each vendor’s terms (i.e., if your company pays its power bill late, that could shut down your entire warehouse—so it’s likely worth making sure the electric company gets paid on time!).

Equity

Equity is a matter of simple math: Do the assets outweigh the liabilities, or vice versa? If the company is running with a net positive, then congratulations—you’re profitable. If the books balance perfectly, the company is on a sustainable path. But if you’re in the negative, what’s going on?

In some cases, it’s fully expected to run a net loss: For instance, if your organization has taken on $1 million in financing for construction of a new warehouse, this loan will take quite a while to pay off in its entirety. If you’re running negative due to a known expenditure that you’ve calculated eventual ROI on, this is not a cause for concern. However, if the math isn’t adding up, this may mean it’s time to either look at raising investor funds to give the company more runway to grow, or look at what operating expenses could be scaled back (more on that in a minute).

Chart of accounts part 2: income statement accounts

The other side of your chart of accounts is the income statement accounts—which should provide a snapshot of your profitability for any particular time frame, as opposed to the long-range view of your balance sheet. In this case, we’ll look at revenues and operating costs to determine profitability.

Revenues

In this section, you’ll track revenues generated from business activities and the date the funds (or credits) are received, including general business income such as:

Invoices sent (accounts receivable)
Income received (this can be broken down by specific customers or by sales of particular products)
Non-operating revenue can be included here, such as:
Interest from business investments
Dividends
Profits from sale of business assets
Rental income
Note that you can also include items like discounts provided or refunds granted here, too—this kind of debit will be listed as a “contra-revenue account.”

Expenses

Expenses represents the broad category of all the associated costs it takes to run a business. In this category, your finance team will track costs associated with items including:

Product costs (such as raw materials and manufacturing, or cost to purchase wholesale goods)
Equipment cost (likely tied to ongoing financing)
Rental costs
Utility costs
Marketing costs
Depreciation of assets
Labor costs

You’ll likely also track some non-operational expenses, such as:

Taxes
Interest paid
Operating losses
Penalties and fines

With income statement accounts, you should be able to evaluate the company’s profitability on a quarter-by-quarter basis, looking at how business expenses and revenue are shifting over time.

While a good finance team can track all the raw data in a chart of accounts, it’s not always easy to slice and dice the numbers to understand what they all mean together—particularly when you’re trying to incorporate information provided by many different lines of business or even different branches of a larger corporation.

A manual ledger may be sufficient for smaller businesses. But as a company grows, it will become increasingly important to move to a software solution that will enable you to automatically update your chart of accounts based on incoming data streams (through integrating with payroll, invoicing solutions, and your business bank accounts), and will provide tools for interdepartmental teams to collaborate on sharing their budget reports. Ensure that your finance team has the right tools it needs to build a comprehensive chart of accounts—and provide effortless reporting that will guide your company on the path to profitability.

Article Dean Dorton

Raleigh, N.C., January 10, 2017– Massey Consulting, a leading accounting software consulting firm in Raleigh, NC, announced that they have signed an agreement to become an Adaptive Insights partner. Massey Consulting will resell, implement, and support the Adaptive Suite. This agreement will allow Massey Consulting to continue to expand its consulting offerings for its current customer base as well as future customers.

“The Adaptive Insights partner channel is a critical component of our business strategy,” said Carolee Gearhart, senior vice president, customer success, and global channels. “We select our partners based on their business focus and ability to extend the value of our cloud planning solution. Massey Consulting enables us to further broaden our reach to nonprofit organizations across the US and Canada that want to adopt an active planning approach. We look forward to a mutually beneficial partnership with Massey.”

“Adaptive Insights is the best-in-class product for budgeting and forecasting software,” said Massey Consulting founder Philip Massey. “They are a natural fit with our current ERP software solutions as well as our company motto of only offering our customers the best possible products for their businesses.”

Adaptive Insights is the leading cloud-based planning, forecasting, reporting, and analysis software that is fully integrated with Intacct. The company’s Adaptive Suite enables organizations to collaboratively plan and model, easily access real-time analytics, streamline complex reporting, and accelerate financial consolidation.”In order to better serve our customers and increase their effectiveness through leveraging technology and best practices, we continue to expand with our ISV partnerships, and Adaptive Insights was the next logical step,” added Massey.

Massey Consulting offers multiple resources for nonprofits and businesses investigating cloud-based solutions. In addition to several white papers, Massey Consulting offers numerous webcasts (https://www.masseyconsulting.net/calendar/) on a variety of cloud technology topics.

About Massey Consulting

Founded in 2002, Massey Consulting is a reseller for accounting software products Intacct and Microsoft Dynamics GP. Our consultants boast a wealth of practical field experience gained as controllers, accountants and information system professional in a wide range of business environments. We are certified, recognized experts in each of the software solutions we offer. Our clients benefit from efficient, integrated solutions that allow them to focus more their business and less on their software. Massey Consulting currently serves over 80 clients across the United States and Canada.

Media Contact:
Catherine Cottingham
919-508-6063
Massey Consulting
Catherine@masseyconsulting.net