DentalPlans.com Takes A Bite Out Of Budgeting Complexity With Adaptive Planning

Adaptive Planning announced that its on-demand application has been selected by DentalPlans.com. Adaptive Planning’s easy-to-use solution has enabled the fast-growing discount dental plans provider to formalize their budgeting, forecasting, and reporting processes, increase managers’ accountability for financial results, and significantly improve decision making.

Less than a decade after its founding, DentalPlans.com has emerged as a leader in delivering comprehensive discount dental plans to individuals, families and groups. To continue its profitable growth, DentalPlans.com realized it would have to increase the scrutiny and accuracy of its internal controls, accounting and collections. “We had gained enough momentum and resources to start preparing for the future, rather than just reacting to what was happening,” said Buddy Johnson, chief financial officer of DentalPlans.com. “Our new solution had to meet two key criteria: one, help us build a formal budget process that would hold people accountable; and two, enable us to run forecasts that would appeal to potential investors.”

After evaluating eight different budgeting, forecasting, and reporting systems, DentalPlans.com found that most solutions were either too simplistic for the company’s business needs or too costly and complex for its personnel to support. Only Adaptive Planning offered the right balance.

“Adaptive Planning let us meet our critical needs with one system,” said Johnson. “It’s a perfect fit for companies that want an enterprise-class budgeting, forecasting, and reporting system but haven’t yet reached enterprise size.”

After configuring their model in Adaptive Planning’s online application and providing access to users throughout the company, DentalPlans.com was able to significantly enhance its planning, budgeting and forecasting processes. Using the system, DentalPlans.com has, for the first time ever, created a formal budget—enabling performance management that just was not possible before.

“We’re using our budget as a management tool to increase everyone’s accountability,” said Johnson. “Budget participants are really taking ownership of the process. After not having a formalized budget process, suddenly everyone is ‘talking budget’ around here.”

With Adaptive Planning, DentalPlan.com’s executives can collaborate more effectively as they refine and implement performance measures for the company. Managers meet monthly to make key business decisions based on consistent, accurate reports.

“Once we were up and running on Adaptive Planning, we began using a collaborative process to forecast monthly revenues. For the first month of the fiscal year, I expected to be off by about 10 percent,” said Johnson. “But we were only off by one-half percent! Adaptive Planning’s forecasting tools really helped us hone our results.”

DentalPlans.com uses Adaptive Planning’s dashboards to deliver self-service and ad-hoc reports to managers and executives. The company also uses the solution for its ongoing monthly reporting process—producing a management model that integrates reporting, forecasting and business planning.

“With the reporting we used to do out of our general ledger, there was no way of validating numbers,” recalled Johnson. “With Adaptive Planning, there are checks and balances to help point out inconsistencies so that we can quickly make adjustments when our numbers are out of sync.”

“Not only is the Adaptive Planning system user-friendly, but the customer service unbelievable,” noted Johnson. “Our support contact is like an extra member of our staff. She’s very responsive, always available, and any issues are always resolved quickly.”