Adaytum Software Extends Flagship Financial Planning Solution With New 'Budget Explorer'.

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 17, 1999--

New Suite of Budgeting Templates Combines The Completeness of

a Budgeting Application With The Flexibility of a Toolkit For Fast

Budgeting That Follows Accepted "Best Practices"

Adaytum Software, the leading supplier of financial planning solutions, today unveiled "Budget Explorer," an extended set of templates, frameworks, and methods for its flagship Adaytum Planning.

Budget Explorer offers the robustness of a complete budgeting application with the flexibility companies need to tailor the solution to their own requirements and needs. With Budget Explorer, financial managers can create a fast, efficient budgeting cycle that follows the industry's accepted "best practices" for budgeting and planning.

Budget Explorer is designed for accountants and financial managers who are using Adaytum Planning to build a complete corporate budgeting model. By starting from a pre-built, fully integrated, and completely customizable income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement, Adaytum users can dramatically reduce the time required to create a comprehensive budgeting model with Budget Explorer - typically to just a few days.

In creating an income statement, Budget Explorer combines revenue and personnel modules with the ability to model expenses in proportion to headcount, sales, floor space, seasonalities, and other factors. It also handles centrally allocated costs and the effect of new capital expenditures on depreciation.

Beyond the income statement, Budget Explorer also creates an integrated balance sheet and cash flow statement. By simply filling in tables, users can model each line of the balance sheet to reflect the separate effects of the income statement, capital expenditure, financing, taxes, and other factors.

"The new Budget Explorer features in Adaytum Planning are the result of two major forces," said Sue Strother, chief marketing officer for Adaytum Software. "First, our customers are under intense pressure to deliver results faster than ever before. Budget Explorer responds to that requirement by dramatically reducing the time it takes to build and deploy a robust budget model. Just as important, Budget Explorer builds on the many years of experience that we have had building budgeting systems with our customers. By distilling these best practices into a fast, repeatable process, Budget Explorer provides customers with added assurance that their budgeting model will be successful."

A FAST PATH TO ENTERPRISE BUDGETING

Budget Explorer is a new set of features that is integrated within the core Adaytum Planning product. These features include:

--Fully customizable, integrated financial statements

--Built-in links between financial statements

--Hierarchical modeling of company structure

--Support for a variety of time periods, including 12 months, 12 periods of 4-4-5 weeks, 13 x 4-week periods, quarters, several years or any combination of these or other timescales

--Revenue to gross margin or operating margin broken down by product, project or customer; region, store or profit-center; and channel or sector

--Personnel planning by individual, job type, or grade

--Budget line items calculated from units and rates

--Multiple line item detail for each account

--Multiple line item detail for each department

--Expenses calculated as a base plus a percentage

--Seasonality applied to an annual income or expense

--Capital expenditure item by item or by category, with depreciation calculated on straight-line, sum of digits or reducing balance methods

--Ability to allocate costs (or income) based on headcount, sales, or other drivers

--Automatic import of actuals from your general ledger 

--Variance analysis by account and department for current period, year-to-date or full year

--Rolling forecasts

--Multiple scenarios

--Ability to set timings for cash payments based on days credit, set payment dates, or a custom profile of accounts receivable and payable

--Inventory modeling based on fluctuations in forecast inventory levels

--Capital expenditure, stock issues, loans, and other financing

--Journal entries for `one-time' events

--Multiple currencies

--Aggregated income statement from multiple business units

BEST OF BOTH WORLDS: COMPLETE APPLICATION, FLEXIBLE CUSTOMIZATION

"We needed to create our budget quickly, so we sought the completeness of a pre-built application," said Michael Costa, corporate controller of Quaker Fabric Corp. "However, we were also looking for the flexibility we needed to accurately model our business as well. Adaytum Planning with Budget Explorer gives us the best of both worlds. We were able to meet our short-term budgeting goals and the modeling power of the product is enabling us to gradually adjust and extend our model to reflect our unique budgeting requirements."

PLATFORMS, PRICING, AND AVAILABILITY

Budget Explorer is a new standard feature of Adaytum Planning for Windows 3.1, Windows 95/98, and Windows NT 4.0 and supports multiple users across any standard LAN environment. The product is bundled with Adaytum Planning and pricing begins at $20,000 for 10 seats with volume discounts available.

ABOUT ADAYTUM SOFTWARE

Founded in 1990, Adaytum Software develops and markets "best-of-class" budgeting, planning, and performance analysis software for medium- and large-sized corporations whose requirements have grown beyond the scope of the spreadsheet environment. Adaytum Software is an international, privately held company with offices in the U.S., U.K., and Denmark. The company's flagship product, Adaytum Planning, is used by more than 10,000 users in a broad spectrum of business planning applications, including budgeting, planning, forecasting, consolidation, management, reporting, product profitability analysis, and activity-based costing.

Adaytum is a trademark of Adaytum Software. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are property of their respective holders.