While it’s super helpful to have the ability to lock your plan versions in Workday Adaptive Planning, it’s not a perfect solution all the time. A “locked” version will prevent users from entering new data or updating formulas, but the formulas themselves are not prevented from recalculating when the formula input values change. This becomes particularly problematic when we are using time modifiers in our formulas.
The most common example I encounter is when we’re using some sort of trailing average calculation to populate a budget. For example, if you’re creating a 2026 budget with trailing 12 month average calculations for your operating expenses, those 2026 values will continue to change until 2025 is closed. While there are many formulaic ways around this, I like the option to use an Adaptive data source integration to hard code the values and prevent future changes to the data.
Using an Adaptive data source integration works really well when we are using shared formulas, since they are natively able to be overridden. You can manually override these formulas by typing over them in a cell on a sheet in Adaptive, but you might not know that you can override them through an import as well. A general overview of the process is as follows:
- Adding a new source to your Adaptive data source for the data you want to hard code (You will need to create a “Workday Adaptive Planning” data source as a planning data source if this hasn’t been done yet. A helpful walkthrough of this step can be found here).
- Creating a Planning Data Loader that takes that formulaic data from the staging table and pushes that same data back into the same data intersections as hard coded values.
- Running that loader for the version and time periods you want it to run for. Running the loader is what triggers the formula overrides.
- As the last step, lock the version you pushed into so that the hard coded values that were integrated cannot be changed in the future.
Once this loader is set up, it can be easily reused by changing the versions and the time periods it’s being run for. It is a great process to have in your back pocket for preventing changes in your budget versions.
Revelwood is an award-winning, Platinum Solution Provider for Workday Adaptive Planning. We build solutions for the Office of Finance that minimize your risk by seamlessly incorporating business analytics into your everyday thinking. By combining the software with our best practices and out-of-the-box applications, we help businesses achieve their full potential with Workday Adaptive Planning.
Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:
Version Specific Transactions Drillthroughs
Forecast Explanations in Predictive Forecaster
