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5 Things Finance Professionals Learned at Adaptive Live 2015

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Adaptive Insights is the leader in cloud corporate performance management (CPM). Via its software as a service (SaaS) platform, the company offers capabilities for budgeting, forecasting, reporting, consolidation, dashboards, and analytics that empower finance, sales, and other business leaders with insight to drive true competitive advantage. Ranging from mid-sized companies and nonprofits to large corporations, more than 2,600 companies in 85 countries use Adaptive Insights.

Adaptive Live is Adaptive Insights annual user conference, an event that attracts customers and partners from all over the world. This year’s conference took place during the week of April 20th at the San Jose Convention Center, and with over 1,000 attendees, 60+ breakout sessions and a wildly entertaining keynote from Freakonomics co-author, Stephen Dubner, the event provided a wide variety of learnings for successful finance professionals.

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1. EVERYTHING from Stephen Dubner's keynote address.

Proven by Dubner’s hilarious anecdotes and research, the clever application of data coupled with a smart incentive can change behavior for the better. One must use real data to get real results, a methodology that can be applied to both life and business practices. Without strong data to support your actions, human nature is to find the data that meets the needs of individual ideals.

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2. The role of finance is moving from tactical to strategic.

As a modern and strategic CFO rises from the back office, number-crunching realm that finance used to be known for, the department is now responsible for helping define the business mission instead of simply supporting it.

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3. Finance has greater data visibility than ever.

As our founder Rob Hull put it, "Finance is in a unique position to see data throughout the company. Help your teams connect the dots." Finance now has the capabilities to collect and fuel accurate data throughout an organization and become a catalyst for change rather than a symbol of stagnant, tedious processes and repetitive number-crunching. By connecting the cross-functional dots, finance will help achieve better organizational understanding, cohesiveness, and alignment.

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4. There are three steps to successfully identifying KPI's.

Defining key performance indicators can be a stressful process that is subject to individual assessment and varying opinions. Armanino LLP, Adaptive Insights partner, broke down how to identify KPI’s in three simple bullets:

• Does it significantly impact the company?

• Is it controllable/actionable?• Is it systematically

measurable?Armanino’s Robot MiP carrying the ‘Flame of Insight’ at Adaptve Live.

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5. There’s room for improvement.

As our CEO Tom Bogan acknowledged, analytics and decision-making are the primary areas that CFOs say need improvement. Since finance is shifting to the forefront of business, the need for rapid results is increasing – there needs to be access to real-time insights in order to adapt to various business changes and drivers. And as Tom also acknowledged, Adaptive Insights - along with our partners and passionate customer community- is committed to that evolution.

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We’ve listed the 5 main takeaways from Adaptive Live, but the learning never stops! Visit the blog for continuous insight and follow Adaptive on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.