adaptive insights tips & tricks

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Save Personal Views on Sheets with Dashboard

April 21, 2021 by Michelle Song Leave a Comment

If you open any sheets via the Sheet tab in Workday Adaptive Planning, you can only save one view per sheet per version per user. Prior to the 2020 R2 Release, the only workaround to save the same sheet with multiple views is using EIP, Excel Interface for Planning, and open the sheet in multiple tabs or workbooks.

With the 2020 R2 Release, you now can save multiple views for the same sheet in the same tab per version in Dashboard. This function is extremely helpful to users that manage multiple departments, or anyone who wants to view the same data with different views in one tab.

In the example below, I opened the Product Revenue sheet twice in the same dashboard. The top sheet is showing the Gross Revenue account in the Product Revenue sheet for Customer 1 by Product values. The bottom sheet is showing the same Product Revenue sheet but by Accounts.

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Save Personal Views in Dashboard

Once the Display Option is applied to the sheet in Dashboard, it is automatically saved for the selected version and there is no need to click the Save icon. If the dashboard is a shared dashboard, the latest published changes will become the new view of the sheets in that dashboard.

Here is another example. The top one has a filter to show New York employees and the second one has a filter to show just the employees in Canada.

Visit Revelwood’s Knowledge Center for our Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks or sign up here to get our Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks delivered directly to your inbox. Not sure where to start? Our team here at Revelwood can help! Contact us info@revelwood.com for more information.

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Excel Substitute

March 3, 2021 by Michelle Song Leave a Comment

We have something different for today’s Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks post – an Excel tip! Our Adaptive Planning users also use Excel, so we thought they’d find this helpful.

Have you ever wanted to get rid of spaces in some of your Excel cells? Maybe you do not want a cell to have separate words and instead want to use an underscore character. Or maybe you are in a situation where you want to adjust a prefix for a certain range of cells. You can use Excel’s find and replace functionality, but this approach could lead to a time consuming effort if you want to pick and choose the cells where it applies.

Excel’s SUBSTITUTE function can help you solve this problem. The SUBSTITUTE function is used to find a specific set of characters and replace it with something else while also giving you the ability to define details within cells.

The syntax of the function is:

=SUBSTITUTE (text, old_text, new_text)

text
- This is the source that will be changed; this is typically a cell reference.
old_text
- This is the subtext that will be replaced.
new_text
- This is what will replace the old subtext

If the cell in A5 consists of “Happy Birthday” then it can be updated to “Happy_Birthday” via the following:

=SUBSTITUTE (A5, “ “, “_”)

In addition, the parameter that defines the new text can also be a cell reference. This gives you the ability to quickly change the results of a large set of data by simply updating a single cell.

This approach will allow you to quickly find and replace characters within specific cells instead of having to manually go through a set of cells via Excel’s find and replace functionality.

The team at Revelwood has been recognized by Adaptive for its thought leadership in the space, commitment to its Adaptive Insights practice, and its rapid achievements of milestones. Visit Revelwood’s Knowledge Center for our Adaptive Insights Tips & Tricks or sign up here to get our Adaptive Insights Tips & Tricks delivered directly to your inbox. Not sure where to start with Adaptive Insights? Our team here at Revelwood can help! Contact us info@revelwood.com for more information.

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Interactive Dashboards – Dynamic Planning with Embedded Sheets

February 24, 2021 by Dave Miersch Leave a Comment

More often than not, clients of Revelwood will make use of multiple sheets in Workday Adaptive Planning to support different aspects of their planning process(es). When using several sheets to make changes to key drivers, assumptions and scenario drivers, clients often ask the question, “How can I quickly and easily see how the changes I make on one sheet impact the rest of my budget?” One tried and true method was using multiple screens or windows with multiple sheets or reports open to see how the model changes. While this method works, it can be cumbersome and as many of us are working remotely for the foreseeable future, it likely becomes problematic if we do not have access to all those great monitors at home.

Another more dynamic solution is using the newer functionality of embedded sheets within Dashboards.

Within Dashboards, users now have the ability to add any Standard, Modeled, or Cube sheet you have created within Adaptive Planning to enter data without ever having to navigate away from our dashboard view(s). These sheets act as usable copies of your existing sheets allowing changes to be made and instantly reflected on related charts and dashboards.

In the below example, we have three Dashboards. Sales Volume & Margin by Month, budgeted Sales Revenue vs Prior Year Actuals and budgeted Sales Volume vs Prior Year Actuals.

Interactive dashboards in Workday Adaptive Planning

While in edit mode, navigate to the dashboard selector and simply drag and drop the “Sheet” option into your dashboard window. An additional drop-down menu will then be available to select all available sheet options to choose from.

Learn about interactive dashboards in Workday Adaptive Planning

Select the appropriate sheet you want to use to make changes and analyze the overall model impact and you’re all set! You now have your previously created and defined sheet embedded within your dashboard.

In my example, we have added our “Bottle Release Schedule” sheet which is essentially our sales unit planning sheet.

Understanding interactive dashboards in Workday Adaptive Planning

Making any changes and saving them within the Dashboard will automatically funnel through to dependent charts and dashboards. We are going to add 1,000 units sold in the month of April 2021 in rows 1 and 3, click save in the sheet, and then see how those changes impact our entire model in real time.

Dynamic planning with embedded sheets in Workday Adaptive Planning

We can quickly see that making those changes has added 2,000 units to our total sales volume as well as $300,000 in additional revenue.

Any sheet created within Adaptive can be pulled into dashboards for more fluent and flexible planning and reporting in one view. While some functionality is limited vs using the sheet itself, having the ability to make changes and immediately see the impact without managing multiple windows can be a valuable tool in the heart of budget season.

The team at Revelwood has been recognized by Workday Adaptive Planning for our thought leadership in the space, commitment to our Workday Adaptive Planning practice, and our rapid achievements of milestones. Visit Revelwood’s Knowledge Center for our Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks or sign up here to get our Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks delivered directly to your inbox. Not sure where to start with Workday Adaptive Planning? Our team here at Revelwood can help! Contact us info@revelwood.com for more information.

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Excel Reporting Using a Report Template

February 17, 2021 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

Many users of Workday Adaptive Planning utilize OfficeConnect for their Excel reporting. But not all users will have access to OfficeConnect, depending on your organization. But there is another great option for Excel reporting called a Report Template.

What is the difference between OfficeConnect and a Report Template?

Templates are Excel files which can be added to regular reports, including repeating reports. Instead of running an HTML report, you can have a custom Excel report. Below are some nice features, as once you use it, it will become a favorite for reporting.

Report Templates allow:

Custom formatting data from Adaptive such as background color, font color, and font type.
Calculations on the data, along with including graphs and notes.
Use with repeating reports.
A saved Excel file attached to a report.
Macros can be added to templates.

Here is a quick tutorial on how to create an Excel report using a report template.

Locate the Adaptive Planning HTML report which has the data you want for your Excel report.
a. Here is an HTML Report.
b. Locate the report in the Reports screen.
Right click on the report and choose Run as Excel, and the file will download.
Open the downloaded Excel file. You will see the Excel data on the first sheet.
a. The report is the same as the report in Step 1 but in Excel.
On this sheet, you can change fonts, and add conditional formatting, calculations, etc. If you want to add other sheets for more reporting, you can use formulas to reference data on the first sheet.
a. In this example, we have changed fonts style and added conditional formatting for the % Var column.
b. In this example, we added another sheet and created a graph and ratios using formulas to reference the first sheet (report data). You can add multiple sheets to create a customized report or a report book. You can also hide sheets. For example, the Report Info tab Adaptive includes in all excel reports or the first sheet with the data.
Return to the report in Adaptive Planning.
a. Right click on the same HTML report and select Attach Template.
b. Click Choose File button and select the excel file you just created which has your updated report with formatting, formulas, graphs, etc. Click OK. Once the file is selected click Open.
c. The file icon will change colors from blue to green, so you know the report has been properly attached.
Run the report and it will automatically download as an Excel file. Your existing report has been generated and has applied all applicable prompts. For example, the month of data will change per the prompt option selected.

You now have an Excel report! And can run it anytime!

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: CAPEX Planning – Your Tool for Growth

November 11, 2020 by Mary Luchs Leave a Comment

CAPEX (capital expenditures) planning is a key feature in Workday Adaptive Planning and gives the Office of Finance and senior executives greater visibility into the company’s financial risk, while also providing a tool for measuring corporate growth. Before we go into the specifics of CAPEX in Adaptive Planning, let’s take a step back and get an understanding of CAPEX.

Capital Expenditures: Overview

Capital expenditures are expenditures within a company that are not expensed on the income statement. They are considered to be investments into the company. Companies with higher capital expenditures are said to be investing more heavily into the future of their organizations.

CAPEX to Operating Cash Ratio

The CAPEX to operating cash ratio analyzes a company’s ability to acquire long term assets using cash flows. In other words, it indicates how much of a company’s cash flows is going towards capital expenditures. It is a great tool for measuring a company’s emphasis on growth. A higher CAPEX to operating cash ratio is an indicator of high growth in a company. A company whose ratio is too high could be taking on too much financial risk. While it is beneficial to invest in CAPEX, overspending in this area can compromise a company’s ability to pay off debts or cover other operating expenses. It is vital for the Office of Finance to have accurate, up to date visibility into CAPEX data in order to assess the company’s level of risk and make appropriate adjustments.

CAPEX and Depreciation

Depreciation is important to consider for asset management, especially for companies who are putting a lot of money towards their assets in the form of capital expenditures. A company must consider how their CAPEX depreciates when looking at their assets. This is a helpful tool to consider:

CAPEX > Depreciation → Growing assets

CAPEX < Depreciation → Shrinking assets

Accumulated depreciation of capital expenditures is indicated on the Balance Sheet, so it is important to consider how this impacts the net income of the company. Depreciation reduces the taxable income of a company, which is impactful especially for companies in a high growth phase who are investing heavily in capital. In addition to the CAPEX to operating cash ratio, depreciation can also be considered when analyzing a company’s growth.

Capex Planning in Workday Adaptive Planning

In addition to having a basic balance sheet and a P&L sheet, you should create a CAPEX sheet in Adaptive Planning. The CAPEX sheet offers a more specific look at capital expenditures than the balance sheet and the P&L sheet, allowing for more targeted analysis. Generating a CAPEX sheet also allows you to drill into expenses and depreciation for budgeting and forecasting purposes on a more granular level.

In conjunction with the balance sheet, the CAPEX sheet is important for budgeting cash and analyzing capital investments. In Adaptive Planning, the CAPEX model consists of calculated accounts in a modeled sheet. These calculated accounts include capital values and their coinciding depreciation accounts. Each modeled account is performing the same calculation based on the asset class selected by the user. Asset class is a text selector column based on the categories of capital expenditures that are specific to your business. Companies vary greatly in the ways that they calculate capital value and depreciation, but all businesses can benefit from CAPEX planning.

How to do CAPEX planning in Workday Adaptive Planning

Adding a CAPEX sheet to your Adaptive Planning implementation gives you a powerful tool for understanding the investments in your company. When you can analyze this data at a granular level, you can better assess if your company has too much financial risk, or if you are invested at an appropriate level.

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Override Formulas in Sheets

November 4, 2020 by Michelle Song Leave a Comment

If you want to write a formula in an account in Workday Adaptive Planning, but still want to give your team the ability to override the formula and enter different data, you can use Shared Formulas to achieve that.

The Shared Formulas function of Adaptive Planning allows users to write level-specific and version-specific formulas for GL and custom accounts. Below is a screenshot of the Shared Formula page in Adaptive.

Workday Adaptive Planning: Override Formula

First, you will select the version, account, and levels that you want to write the formula. Then, you will write the formula in the “Set formula” box. Before you save the formula, you can choose to reserve/remove the user edits in the account if any. If you reserve the user edits, the formula will not override cells that already have data and only perform the formula in the cells that are blank on sheets.

Workday Adaptive Planning: How to override formulas in sheets

You can use the “Import Shared Formulas” function to import/update the formulas in multiple accounts and levels at a time.

Overrding formulas in Workday Adaptive Planning

Unlike Master Formulas, shared formula values are not locked in sheets. You can override the formula with different data directly in a sheet cell. In the example below, I overridden the formula for account 1110 Petty Cash in Mar 2019 with a different number.

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips: Override Formulas in Sheets

Workday Adaptive Planning Tricks: Override formulas in sheets

Adaptive Insights Tips & Tricks: Trigger for a Cube Calculated Account

February 12, 2020 by Michelle Song Leave a Comment

When you try to use the “actuals overlay” function in a cube calculated account to display actuals data from a modeled sheet, but you keep receiving a formula error that says “Cube Calculation Formulas must evaluate to zero when the cube’s other accounts are zero”, what do you do?

Adaptive Insights Tips & Tricks: Trigger for a Cube Calculated Account

The reason for this is that cube sheets are intended to use for data input with multi-dimensions and calculations within the current cube, but not as a way to display data from other areas in the instance. To solve this problem, you have to condition the account based on another account in the current cube sheet.

For example, you can create a “Trigger Account” and assigned a value of 1 to the account for all intersections and periods that you want to display the data.

Then, in the formula section of the cube calculation account, write

Note: If you do not need the actual overlay function, you can use a Cube Metric account. Cube metric accounts can reference accounts from other sheets and do not need “trigger” accounts.

Adaptive Insights Tips & Tricks: Alternate Time Tree

January 29, 2020 by Michelle Song Leave a Comment

Have you ever wanted to have an alternate time tree/ stratum rollup in Adaptive Insights? The current Adaptive Insight system only supports one stratum rollup and there is no “Time Attribute” available in the current system to group the different time periods together. Here are some workarounds for you.

For example, the screenshot below is your current time tree setup in Adaptive Insights. Week is the lowest time stratum in the time tree. It has a stratum rollup of Week – Month – Quarter – Year.

Alternate time tree in Adaptive Insights

This is the main time tree that you used in your company for planning. However, you also have an alternate time tree that you used for your in store calendar, which has a stratum rollup of Week – Cycle – Year. Weeks are the same in both time trees, but Cycles do not roll up into Month and Quarter, so you couldn’t include Cycle in the current time tree.

Here are two methods to achieve an “alternate time tree”:

If the alternate time tree is only used for reporting purposes, plan at the Week (lowest) time stratum and use Report/OfficeConnect to sum up the weeks for each Cycle.

Understanding alternate time trees in Adaptive Insights

In this case, Cycle1-2019 is a subtotal calculation of WK1 to WK4-2019.

2. If the alternate time tree is used for planning purposes, create a dimension for Cycle and use it in the sheet. An example is shown in the screenshot below of a modeled sheet. The timespan is used to input expense for each week. Week 1 to week 4 is Cycle 1, so the values for Cycle 1 are only entered in those periods.

Here’s a report to show the results.

Understanding stratum rollup in Adaptive Insights

Hope you find this helpful and feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions!

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Save Personal Views on Sheets with Dashboard

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Excel Substitute

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Interactive Dashboards – Dynamic Planning with Embedded Sheets

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Excel Reporting Using a Report Template

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: