Online planning and reporting specialist Adaptive Planning has put together a £5,000 Recession Survival Kit to help businesses revise forecasts and planning scenarios in response to the economic downturn.
The Recession Survival Kit is a 10-seat, £5,000 package designed to be up and running within a week. The payment covers implementation, training and a six month subscription fee for Adaptive's full Enterprise system, which includes budgeting, forecasting and analysis modules, modelling and workflow tools, specialised sales, capital and personnel planning worksheets and a drag-and-drop Report Builder. Other features include:
The software will not be stripped down, but the fixed price implementation will limit its scope to keep users focused on immediate issues, Adaptive Planning CEO Bill Soward explained.
"It focuses on where people need to go with emergency planning exercises to figure out how they should play next few months and 2009. This will give them an organised way to do that and let plan around different sales volumes, expense models and spending assumptions to see how they will affect cashflow," he said.
"For most CFOs, it will be a top-down exercise, they won't have time to roll it all up."
After the first six months, customers can renew or extend their subscription, or decide that the Recession Survival Kit has served its purpose, he added.
Soward denied that the kit was an opportunistic loss-leader. "This is a very tough time to run a business. With all the economic uncertainly if there was ever a time to do planning, it's now.
Having created Adaptive Planning from the start as a software as a service (SaaS) solution, the company has based its marketing around being agile and low risk.
"We've already got a very extensive test drive strategy where you can use the basic budgeting and planning tools. The Enterprise version has a lot more capabilities, but we're pretty used to customers coming in to work at low and zero price levels to try it and see value before buying," Soward said.
In the next week Finance Week will be running a feature by Adaptive looking at Best practice for correcting your company budget.