[Steven Mayhue]

We are looking for budgeting as well as other data analysis in GP and are looking at these 2 products.  Has anyone had experience with either or both?

——————————
Steven Mayhue
Lead Developer/DBA
My Florida Regional MLS
Altamonte Springs FL
——————————

[Guy Shoemaker]

?This is an it depends answer.  We’ve used both for analytical purposes but only used Adaptive for Budgeting.  On the budgeting side Adaptive is a very good tool for creating your budgets.  Depending on what you are doing having a good partner to configure some of the sheets is a big plus, in our case for our travel budget. My big knock is there is no inherent way to get the budget data back into Great Plains.  I could probably hack something together to do so but it hasn’t been a priority.

On the analytical side I find Bi360 to be a more complete & mature product than Adaptive.  My choice would be Bi360 however our accounting staff prefers Adaptive because they find it easier, more intuitive to use.  The big difference in opinion is due to our chart of accounts.  It is inconsistent which causes reporting problems regardless of the tool used.  By inconsistent, I mean the same account segment can mean different things depending on where in the chart of accounts the account falls.  And even within the same categories the same value can mean different things based on the rest of the account number.  Bi360 can handle these complexities but Adaptive requires using hidden rows & columns in their OfficeConnect product to accomplish the same thing.

There is a very different design paradigm behind both products.  Bi360 reads directly from GP and as such picks up any changes automatically.  Adaptive is based on a hierarchical model and depending on your chart of accounts will most likely not pick up new accounts & require adding them manually.  Another difference is Adaptive is a General Ledger only system, whereas Bi360 can access other modules like Purchasing.

Report writing capabilities I give the nod to Bi360 because they are strictly an Excel add-in and use all of its functionality and extend it.  For instance, with Bi360 I can create a report with roll-ups that allows me to expand them.  So I can start by seeing just Income as line and expand it to see all the accounts that make that up and any new accounts are automatically included.  With Adaptive’s OfficeConnect, I can create the report but any new accounts have to be manually added to it.  Adaptive basically has 2 report writers: their online HTML reports & their OfficeConnect add-in.  And the report writers don’t have the same functionality.

Next, is report distribution.  Bi360 has means of distributing reports to people who aren’t users on an automated basis.  Adaptive does not, an Adaptive user has to run the report & send it to a non-Adaptive user.  So this affects your cost.

Bottom line I think Bi360 is a better analytical tool but it requires a bigger investment in terms of time to learn it.  Your best bet is to define what reports / analysis you want to do & see if you can create them in Bi360 and Adaptive.  When you test, if you rely on the vendor to produce the results make sure they understand how you are producing the reports.  Even as standard as Balance Sheets & Profit & Loss Statements are they can have idiosyncrasies.  In our case not all income accounts show under income.  So in Bi360 it is easy to say this report line is all Management Revenue except for accounts XXXX & YYYY. Not so easy in Adaptive.  Also, consider are you working with multiple companies & do you need to do consolidations? 

The big thing to figure out is your chart of account and how well it will work with the tool you choose.

——————————
Guy Shoemaker
Accounting Systems Administrator
International Capital & Management Company
St. Thomas
——————————
——————————————-

[Kerry Hataley]

Good Morning Steve,

Up front I have to say I have not used Adaptive Insights, but I have over 8 years experience with Solver BI360.

From a complete product, Solver does offer it all and if your users are good with excel, then it is a easy flow for them into BI360. So what is the down side…

To take full advantage of the products – There are different add-ons to make it function with Budgets and have the ability to modify and create additional meta-data (links to other data sources put into simple / common names).

If you plan on developing all your own, in-house reports, you will have a learning curve for more complex reporting requirements, but for simple balance sheet or P&L it will take you 5 mins.

All my clients, that have moved to Solver, use BI360 for all there reporting, PERIOD.
It replaces MR / FRx and Excel based reports and with their web portal has a dashboard add-on.
You can utilize the scheduler to produce automatic reports based on both date/time or event.

The WEB Portal option allows for the user to go to a web page and not have to launch excel, it is a very nice feature and also has an add-on for dashboard or ‘BI’ reporting.

As for budgets, I have a client that uses Project Accounting and records and budgets every expense for every transaction to a PA / Cost Category… Over 125k of these combinations. The budget is broken into their area of responsibility, so they only budget to there areas (They also can’t see any other budgets), but they roll up to the manager for approval and so on.

So, Yes it will handle the most of complex budgets. They don’t flow back into Dynamics, but why would you want to? Since you are using BI360, it just links and reports based on the budgets vs actuals. The budgets also have versions so you can do new forecast etc.

So no matter what your requirements, from simple to the most complex, Solver BI360 will handle you needs. You just need to define what those are and how much investment internally or externally you are willing to do.

I am in Tampa, so if you want to chat let me know…

——————————
Kerry Hataley
CEO & President
Nanook Software, Inc
——————————
——————————————-

[Charles Allen]

?I agree with the other two respondents about BI360. BI360 has a history of direct integration with Dynamics GP.

However, for budgeting, you typically use the Data Warehouse module which is where the data is stored. You can also use BI360 for reporting by importing actuals. Unlike GP which separates budget and actual data into separate tables, the Data Warehouse enables you to have it in one place and not have to create budgets by year. You could, for example, just have a budget called BUDGET and then report against it based on the fiscal year.

You have options, though, and the one you choose depends on what you want to do.

Another advantage of the Data Warehouse is reporting because you can pull in data from other sources and combine it with GP data.

If you’re interested, I have a webinar where I discuss uses of the Data Warehouse. I’m also having a webinar on 7/19.

Just Add Data: Using the BI360 Data Warehouse to Empower Reporting Users

Bkd		remove preview
Just Add Data: Using the BI360 Data Warehouse to Empower Reporting Users Join us for a complimentary webinar discussing how the BI360 Data Warehouse can provide an off-the-shelf place to store data from those sources. Combined with tools such as BI360 Reporting and the Web Portal in addition to Power BI, users can query data and create professional reports. View this on Bkd >

——————————
Charles Allen
Senior Managing Consultant
BKD Technologies
Houston, TX
——————————
——————————————-

[Steven Mayhue]

Thank you all for sharing.  The community is always a great place to get insightful information regarding the add on products available to us.

——————————
Steven Mayhue
Lead Developer/DBA
My Florida Regional MLS
Altamonte Springs FL
——————————
——————————————-

[Michael Gummel]

Steve,

We have clients using both products.   One issue that clients on Adaptive has run into is the fact that they don’t have a direct integration to GP but requires their consultants to create the integration.   One other thing to consider (not sure how this will effect things) is that Adaptive was recently purchased by Workday which is a competing ERP product so just something to consider.

——————————
Michael Gummel
Prod Engineer
Paradigm Technology Consulting
Allentown NJ
——————————
——————————————-

[Kristy James]

I’ve never used Solver BI360 but I have implemented and built out Adaptive at a previous job.  My primary take away is make sure you have a good partner who understands your reporting needs or you’ll waste lots of time redoing the setup.

We moved dozens of excel files and hundreds of tabs of data into Adaptive for annual/multi year budgeting, monthly reforecasting, etc.  We opted to manually upload a TB from our ERP into Adaptive (to save $) which was relatively easy once setup.  New accounts stood out and were easily mapped during the import.

The biggest downside I found with Adaptive is that the structure is very ridged and it takes a lot of work to make changes.  You live off “Versions” of data so if you make a change, the changes don’t push back to prior records.  So if you want to see apples to apples, you either have to update prior Versions (very tedious), or manually manipulate the comparative info (not ideal either). 

Not a perfect system but very easy to use and can easily roll together or peel apart different layers of info.  It’s also pretty easy to teach non-financial people how to use it, especially if you’re migrating something previously done in excel over to Adaptive.

——————————
Kristy James
Financial Controller
Dairyland Electrical Industries, Inc
Stoughton WI
——————————
——————————————-

[Noah Moseley]

Hi Steven.

I think you’ll find more pro’s with BI360 in relation to the history of the company and product, the direction of the product, the user-friendliness of the product, the functionality of the product and the pricing structure. If you haven’t already had a demo, their videos help a lot: 

Videos | Corporate Performance Management Software | Solver

Solverglobal		remove preview
Videos | Corporate Performance Management Software | Solver We created this short video to demonstrate just how easy and intuitive the BI360 data warehouse is to get up and running, and how effectively you can manage your company’s data. View this on Solverglobal >

Videos | Corporate Performance Management Software | Solver

Solverglobal		remove preview
Videos | Corporate Performance Management Software | Solver We created this short video to demonstrate just how easy and intuitive the BI360 data warehouse is to get up and running, and how effectively you can manage your company’s data. View this on Solverglobal >

——————————
Noah Moseley, MSX Group
Noah.Moseley@MSXGroup.com

——————————
——————————————-