"Alight's robust planning capabilities distinguish it from the pack."
Alight Planning is a multi-user system for executives, financial staff, and line managers who collaborate in developing financial plans and reviewing financial and operating results.
With Alight Planning, financial planning is fast and effective, allowing integration of strategic and product plans into the budget and forecasting cycle. Alight Planning cuts weeks off the budget cycle and promotes meaningful participation of staff in monthly reviews and rolling forecasts. Alight Planning is also the perfect vehicle for strategic plans, long range market planning and complex business case analysis.
In addition to multi-user security and file management, the Alight Planning feature set includes integrated financials, robust object-based modeling, multi-dimensional reporting and analysis plus integration of actuals with variance analysis.
Price Perpetual License: $8,000 for an Alight Planning Master module. See our Pricing Page for information about Alight Planning User. 20% per year for the Annual Service Package.
Alight automatically incorporates structures and rollups for financial statements — complete P&L, balance sheet, cash flow and contribution analysis. Customizable for any business or industry.
Profit and Loss: GAAP accounting with rollups by category and sub-category for product groups, departments, cost centers and natural class accounts.
Balance Sheet: GAAP accounting with system line items for accumulated earnings, reconciliation of cash requirements, and beginning balances.
Cash Flow: Pre-formatted to GAAP accouting and automatically generated using balance sheet accounts.
Contribution Analysis: Segregates fixed and variable costs based on algorithms for tracing direct and indirect links to revenues. Displays a full P&L with a contribution margin format.
With Alight you quickly create bottoms up financial plans with line item details and hierarchical rollups. Lots of flexibility with intuitive interfaces.
Unlimited line item detail: Create as many line items as you need with automatic rollup to the P&L and balance sheet. Organize line items by product groups, cost centers and natural class accounts.
Easy to use worksheets: Intuitive worksheets for planning revenues, expenses, headcount and balance sheet items. Added worksheets for market backup and specialized calculations such as financial ratios, productivity metrics and activity measures.
Your own time frame:Plan using any time frame — day, week, month, quarter or year. Up to 120 time periods with data columns for units, rate and amount. Add operator columns for subtotals and variances.
Spread tools: Spread data over time periods crossing over subtotals: fill right, increase by value or percent, allocate amounts straight line or proportional, ramp between time periods.
Alight’s architecture: units * rate = amount. Get immediate reporting visibility and linking to underlying activity drivers and metrics using URA.
Integrate market planning: Use units and rates to plan customers, segments, channels or the sales pipeline. Use object-based linking to integrate with revenues and rollup to the P&L.
Sales planning: Compute unit sales, prices and amounts for products across stages and time periods. Sum by product group, geography or other categories.
Headcount planning: Set up your organization plan by job title or employee, number of heads and salary rates. Import from personnel records. Reconcile staffing by person to activity driven.
Expense planning: Link expenses to underlying unit activity drivers and rate assumptions. Drive benefits and supplies from headcount. Drive material costs from unit sales.
URA on reports: Show or hide any combination of units, rate and amount on worksheets. Instantly create a headcount or capital spending report by department.
Build any kind of financial model 8 times faster than with spreadsheets. Without sacrificing power, Alight incorporates intuitive modeling tools that leave spreadsheets behind in speed, clarity and audit trails:
Object based linking: Link to any line item or rollup summary using object names versus cell references. For example: Benefits = Headcount * Benefit Rate. Linked relationships automatically operate across all time periods.
Build sub-detail: Use the Buildup tab for documenting bill of material detail such as a parts list or food costs. Build up details of a payroll tax rate for linking across departments.
Create formulas: Use the Formula tab with object linking for constructing any type of complex staffing, facilities, price break, or commission model. Unlimited conditional operators.
Cross time period operations: Use the X Time tab for computing across time periods: forward volumes for current activity, rolling installed bases, balance sheet waterfalls. Absolute and relative time references.
Accumulation operations: Use the Accumulate tab for balance sheet accruals and time based subscription, renewal and upgrade models.
Advanced operations: Use the Advanced tab for indexing growth rates, seasonal patterns, materials costs. Calculate NPV and IRR.
System notes: Time stamped, user entered notes by line item plus system generated notes that document calculation details and trace links.
With Alight you save time and gain focus by building financial models and plans using stages and scenarios. Stage based planning is an architectural foundation.
Create a base stage: First build a base stage, a model of your business now or a target in the future. Model out line items and linking that are a snapshot of revenues, expenses and capital.
Create alternate stages: Copy a stage and create new ones with different input assumptions reflecting stages in business development: current state, achieve breakeven, add new product.
Create a scenario: Assign stages to time periods to create monthly product plans, budgets and forecasts. Incorporate actuals into time period reports to create an actual + plan rolling forecast.
Create alternate scenarios: Copy scenarios then create new ones to test timing and milestone impacts — e.g. a longer development cycle, a faster sales ramp or a delayed facility. Up to 100 scenarios.
Scope alternate strategies: Use stages and scenarios to test alternate strategies for managing the business or raising capital. Set targets for Year 1, 2 and 3. Set up best and worst cases. Compare strategies and compute variances.
Key measures is Alight’s dashboard for managing inputs and viewing results. Track the most important variables in your business in a single pane. Make changes to inputs on-the-fly.
Change input assumptions: Organize, display and change plan inputs from a single dashboard interface. Watch financial reports automatically update in the main worksheet area.
Display metrics: Display virtually any financial result or operational measure:
unit and $ revenues,headcount and expenses, activity levels, capacity, efficiency, volume, financial ratios, profit, cash.
Handoff to users: Solve a big training problem! Use key measures to focus users on their own planning assumptions and actual results. Assign a custom key measures group to a specific user.
Customize by worksheet: Create and display key measures by sheet: sales activity for the Revenue, productivity for Headcount, key ratios for the P&L and Balance Sheet.
No formulas! Using Alight's point and click interface, create multiple planning and analysis reports in second. Use intelligent operators for totals, variances and other analyses.
Universal reports: Create one report format with columns organized the way you want. The column format automatically replicates to other worksheets.
Point and click report generation: Select the data and operator columns you want, then click on the report where they should appear. No report generation interface is easier, even in producing rolling forecasts.
Intelligent operators: Place operator columns anywhere on a report. Automatically compute variances, percentages, averages, totals, causal analyses, multipliers. No formulas. Just functionality.
Report column tools: With a single click, automatically show or hide: % Sales,
% Total, Run Rate, Operators, Details, Units, Rate, Amount, and column names.
Spread across columns: Use Alight’s spread tools in formatted universal reports. Spread across quarter and year totals without disrupting the math. Spread across disparate number types — e.g. comma and currency — maintaining integrity of the data.
Gain insight into the numbers using Alight’s powerful analysis tools and graphing.
Sensitivity analysis: The most powerful sensitivity analysis interface ever designed — automatically generate a ranked list of the most important inputs that impact sales, profit or any variable in the plan.
Goal seek: Set a goal for sales, profit or any variable, then see how much an input assumption must change to meet the goal. A ‘must have’ tool, especially for complex break-even analysis.
Tops down adjust: Change inputs for many line items at one time — across-the-board salary adjustments, price changes or sales volumes.
Standard and customized graphs: Spot trouble and analyze trends. A full range of default and customizable graphing formats — bar, line, pie, row, column.
Import financial and operating data from any database at any level of detail with automatic reconciliation to GL totals. Model actuals data with linking different from plan.
Units, rate and amounts: You can import any combination of unit and dollar sales by product, heads and salary rates, expense amounts, underlying activity drivers or other measures.
Reconcile to the GL: System line items reconcile to GL totals for line item actuals below natural class accounts. Financials always tie out.
Model actuals data: Create calculations and linking for actuals different from plan models — for example, line items that calculate actual productivity, utilization and conversion rates.
Import mapping: Automatically create Excel templates of the Alight planning model for mapping actual data from financial and operating databases.
Import maintenance: Automatically update Excel import templates for changes in the Alight model: adds, deletes, name changes, calculation methods.
Create rolling forecasts: Combine monthly actuals with plan data to forecast a revised year total outlook. View actuals trends to incorporate into forecast assumptions.
Compare actuals versus plan: Quickly construct month or year-to-date comparisons with units and amount variances, percentage variances and causal analyses that calculate volume and rate impacts.
Look back at actuals: Set individual plan line items to reference actuals in prior time periods as source data — e.g. planned sales driven by actual open orders.
Create multiple dimensions with hierarchies for identifying line items. Use dimensions to “slice and dice” the data with ad hoc reports, filter financial statements, and manage user security.
Multiple dimensions: Create as many as ten dimensions with hierarchies for associating line items with specific attributes such as job title and status, product line, customer, distribution channel, etc.
Line item IDs: Tag line items with dimension members for analyzing data across dimensions and filtering — e.g. ad hoc analysis and user security.
Ad hoc analysis: Create an unlimited array of ad hoc reports that “slice and dice” the data across multiple dimensions — e.g. natural class accounts across departments; sales across regions and products.
Margin analysis: Set up dimension for products, markets and channels. Tag revenue and expense items, then create profitability analyses for each dimension.
Filter financial statements: Automatically create a P&L for divisions or lines of business by defining filters based on dimension settings. Reset filters by choosing from a droplist.
User security: Filter user access to line items with dimension settings--e.g. by account, product or region.
Improve continuity in the planning cycle by integrating different planning models, actuals data and accounting structures seamlessly.
Strategic plan conversion: Convert your strategic plan into a budget format maintaining integrity of the underlying modeling elements but incorporating a chart of accounts.
Product plan integration: Convert the product plan numbers from a product plan into a budget plan or rolling forecast.
Accounting structures: Use (or not) accounting structures anywhere in the plan — product groups, cost centers, natural class accounts, etc.
Use Alight to for multiple user planning with administrative control over user privileges, workgroup collaboration, and process controls for managing changes.
User roles: The plan administrator sets level of access based on user roles in the planning process—read only for reviewers, change values for managers, full modeling for finance staff.
User sheet access: The plan administrator sets user access to financial statements, worksheets, dimension settings and other elements for precisely defining who sees what.
User report access: The plan administrator sets user access to universal reports, ad hoc reports and key measures. Generic report formats are automatically filtered by worksheets and dimensions.
Workgroup architecture: Plan files are distributed and consolidated within workgroups for effective collaboration between line managers and plan reviewers.
Process controls: Changes in line items are time stamped, tracked by user and color coded for quick identification by plan reviewers, analysts and the plan administrator.
Consolidation and conflict resolution: The plan administrator controls consolidation of user files choosing files to incorporate into the master and selecting line items to import when changes conflict.
