Adaptive Insights

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: How to Create a Dimension

February 8, 2023 by Ben Alcock

Dimensions are a key element of Workday Adaptive Planning. Creating a dimension is very easy. Here are some approaches to create dimensions in Workday Adaptive Planning.

The first thing to consider is hierarchy. It is Revelwood’s best practice to keep dimensions flat, meaning with no hierarchy at all, and leave that to dimension attributes. (I will cover more in detail in an upcoming blog post.) We like to keep them flat in order to tag them with dimension attributes. This is very useful when further breaking down dimensions by different categories. If we need dimensions to be in a hierarchy, we build that structure as attributes and keep dimensions flat at the leaf most level.

To add a dimension in Adaptive Planning, select the three lines and navigate to modeling and click Dimensions. At the top of the screen notice this little Create new dimension button.

Click it and give your new dimension a name and unique code.

Now from here there’s a couple ways to add values to your new dimension.

The first is to add it manually. Select your new dimension and click this icon next to the previous create new dimension button, the Create new dimension value button.

From here, give each dimension value a name and a unique code. This could take a while, which is why I recommend one of the next two options instead of the manual process.

The second possible way is via an import. First we need an import template. Click this Import dimension structure button

and download an import template. Open it, and in column A on the first row only, write the name of your overall dimension.

In the next row in column F and G, include the unique dimension value code and name from your data source.

Save and return to Adaptive Planning. Choose your new file and click import. If all goes well you’ve saved a ton of time populating your new dimension.

The third choice is by far the easiest and fastest method. To import dimension values select the check box Data import automatically creates new dimension values:

The parent dimension is already created. Tagging data you’re going to import with a nonexistent dimension value will cause Adaptive Planning to automatically populate your new dimension.

And that’s it for creating dimensions!

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.

Invaio Sciences Sows the Seeds of FP&A Transformation with Workday Adaptive Planning

January 25, 2023 by Revelwood

How do you reduce errors and increase accuracy in financial planning, forecasting and reporting? With Workday Adaptive Planning.

Invaio Sciences, Inc., a Flagship Pioneering company, is headquartered in Cambridge, MA. Invaio is striving to accelerate the leap to a more nature-positive era for agriculture by solving performance and delivery challenges of traditional chemical and biological crop protection.

Until recently, Invaio was using Microsoft Excel for its budgeting, planning, forecasting and reporting needs. The manual nature of Excel – and the human error that comes with it – became too much of a burden for the company.

Invaio is a privately held company that relies on private investments and debt financing until it becomes cash positive. The finance team needs to provide senior management with updated and accurate numbers to help management determine when the company needs to raise more money.

Invaio selected Workday Adaptive Planning with Revelwood as its implementation partner. “A personal connection referred Revelwood to us,” said Ryan Garceau, head of operations & finance at Invaio. “As soon as we met the Revelwood team there was an instant rapport. We’ve since developed a great relationship between the Invaio finance team and the Revelwood team members. The Revelwood team was committed to making this project a big success.”

With its new Workday Adaptive Planning solution, Invaio now has a new approach to managing foreign transactions and financial reporting. “The way we do financial planning, forecasting and reporting are like night and day,” added Garceau. “We’ve gained efficiencies across the board, and we’ve changed the finance team’s value proposition. Our activities are no longer about building the reports, they are about analyzing the data.”

Interested in learning the full story? Read the success story to learn how Invaio benefits from Workday Adaptive Planning.

Texans Credit Union Adapts to Market Fluctuations with Workday Adaptive Planning

January 11, 2023 by Revelwood

How do you provide budgeting and forecasting answers on-the-fly in real-time with spreadsheets? You don’t. This is why Texans Credit Union switched from spreadsheets to Workday Adaptive Planning for streamlined and more efficient budgeting, forecasting and reporting.

Texans Credit Union, founded in 1953 by 11 Texas Instruments employees, now serves over 117,000 members. Its mission is to improve the well-being of all Texans. The organization is a full-service, not-for-profit institution with members throughout the Dallas Fort Worth area.

“A budget built on a series of spreadsheets was not appropriate for a business of our size and complexity,” said Ben Hart, CFO, Texans Credit Union. “Our biggest challenge was that we couldn’t easily pivot and change things on-the-fly.”

Texans Credit Union partnered with Revelwood to build a Workday Adaptive Planning-based budgeting and planning model that included personnel, CapEx and revenue. The data flows into a dashboard for easy visualization.

The budgeting and planning model enables Texans to see actuals at a department level and branch level. “Adaptive is a very intuitive and flexible solution,” stated Hart. “Revelwood was very creative in how they implemented Adaptive for Texans. We had weekly meetings with Revelwood where they would share their knowledge and even go through technical details with us.”

Interested in learning the full story? Read the success story to learn how Texans benefits from Workday Adaptive Planning.

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Crosstabs – The Significance of and How to Build

October 12, 2022 by Alex Goldman

Crosstabs in Workday Adaptive Planning are a great way to visualize and analyze data. This type of chart is great for comparing data sets and their relationships. Data in a Crosstab is visualized in a tabular format. Crosstab allows you to compare change over time, based on one or more accounts. Crosstabs also allow you to add different dimensions to view variances throughout the company. For example, a Crosstab can display a company’s revenue and net profit from different years, as well as filter by office or location.

How to Build a Crosstab

There are a few rules to follow in order to successfully build a Crosstab. At least one Account is needed to be selected to build a Crosstab. While Time is typically used in Crosstabs, it is not required when making the visualization. The Time Dimension will allow you to compare data results from previous time periods, which can allow businesses to analyze whether they are going in the right direction. Here is a step-by-step development of a Crosstab to view Expenses for a company on a quarterly basis and by Supervisor Organization (Operations, Corporate, or Other).

The First Step is selecting the Crosstab option and dragging it onto the plain space. Then we can edit the chart name. This is done by selecting the A in the right corner of your screen and then entering the name that you would like to use. For the sake of this example, the name used is “Expense Crosstab.”

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The next step is adding the required accounts and dimensions. In this chart, Columns will be just time, while rows will be both Account and Supervisory Organization. To do this, click the stack of coins below the A on the right side of the screen. Under Columns, select Time, and under rows: Accounts 6100 Payroll, 6200 Taxes and Benefits, 6300 Office Expenses, 6400 Travel and Entertainment, 6500 Marketing, 6999 Other Expenses. You will also Add Supervisory Organization to rows as well.

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This is what the account will look like:

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You can edit the time to be monthly, quarterly, or yearly. You can do this in the bottom right corner where it says “Quarter” by clicking and changing it to month or year. As of now, we have just one time period. Let’s make the dashboard a time range with multiple data points. To do this we will click the line with two small circles.

Now that we have selected this, you can select the time range you would like your Crosstab to display. To adjust the time, click on the time period and make your selection.

For this example, the range Q1 2021 to Q1 2022 was selected. Below is the final product for the Crosstab.

As shown, the Crosstab is a simple but effective way to paint and visualize numbers that any company can use for an easy way to track and analyze finances.

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Data Integration and the Planning Data Source

August 17, 2022 by Marc Assenza Leave a Comment

Did you know that Workday Adaptive Planning integrations can use the metadata in Adaptive Planning as a part of the integration?

It’s true! The process requires setting up the credential and setting up a data source for Adaptive Planning. You must have the proper credentials yourself within Adaptive Planning to set this up.

To set up the credential you will need to do the following:

From the Workday navigation button, go to Integration🡪Design Integrations

You will arrive at the following screen. Under the Component Library section click on the Credentials option.

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From the list that is presented, the first option is to Create a new Credential, select this.

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Once clicked, the following list will be presented, select Planning Credential, and give it a name. Giving it a name that is meaningful matters, Adaptive certainly fits the bill here.

Once created, you will see that your credential exists under credentials in the Component Pane, but no access to the data source has been granted yet because no authorized user has been assigned. To assign an authorized user (a user with the rights to perform all these steps) to the credentials, you follow the on-screen instructions and click “Authorize” under the Actions panel.

When you click authorize, the following appears, enter the credentials in the pop-up screen and click “Authorize” on the lower right-hand portion of the screen.

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Next you will want to click the Save button to save the login information with the credential.

The next step will be to Test the connection. This is done by clicking on “Test Connection” under the Actions pane. A pop-up window will display, click on “Test.” If the login credentials are valid, the following window will appear and the credential is all set up.

To set up the data source, you will need to do the following:

Under the Component Library, click on Data Sources.

Click on the option “Create New Data Source.”

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Here again select Planning Data Source and give it a meaningful name, keeping the name the same in this example and calling it Adaptive.

Once the Data Source is created, the following screen will appear. Here you will assign the Data Source the Credential that was created in step 1 and save it.

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You will notice that no tables have appeared. That is because we have not defined them yet.

On the left-hand side under Actions, click on “Manage Sources.”

The following popup window will appear, click on the sources folder first, then click on the Add button.

You will now see a list; in the example we will import metadata about Accounts and Levels. Those two will be selected.

You have the option to rename the source, so Accounts and Levels will be used in place of the default name.

No tables are in the Data Source yet because the Data Source needs to be saved and the structure needs to be imported. Click the Save option first followed by “Import Structure.”

The table structures are now present as seen below.

The next step is to import the data, this is done by clicking “Import Data” under the Actions pane.

That’s all it takes to set up the credential and the Adaptive Data Source, now you’re ready to utilize it in the Staging area for integration however you see fit!

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Common Questions Asked During Training

August 18, 2021 by Gary Leiffer Leave a Comment

My next five Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks posts will explore the most-frequently asked questions during my Workday Adaptive Planning training classes. In each tip/trick article I will present the question, the reason it is being asked and my well-rehearsed response.

I have been associated with and instructing Adaptive Planning students for seven years. More than 1,000 clients, partners, employees or independent consultants have attended classes I present, which include Introduction to Adaptive Planning and Reporting, Introduction to OfficeConnect and Refresher training sessions. Our students attend these classes virtually, in-person at Adaptive Live or while working at Adaptive, or at Microtek offices nation-wide. There are many questions asked by students – some as basic as “where is the save button” (very common question actually…!) however I am zeroing on the key/important questions that I receive and respond to. This article’s most-common asked question is:

Q: What is the difference between an attribute and a dimension?

A. The key difference is that a dimension when in use holds data while an attribute is a tag for reporting and sorting data already in the database.

The example of a dimension I always present is for a company which has a GL Account string as follows: Company-Department-Account-Customer-Product. When entering a revenue line item the GL Account string may be Company 1, Department Sales, Account Revenue, Customer X and Product Y as follows: 1-Sales-Revenue-X-Y. For a telephone expense entry for their accounting department: Company 1, Department Accounting, Account Telephone Expense, and Customer and Product are “0” as in non-applicable for this specific entry. Customer and Product in this example are the perfect definition/application of the Dimension – holds data when in use however not always applicable.

Examples of attributes (used on Levels, Accounts and Dimensions) that I present are: Customer Dimension with each individual customer “tagged” with the “Type” of customer they are – with Customer Type being the Dimension Attribute and the Attribute “values” being the type themselves.

Common questions asked during Workday Adaptive Training

The previous image indicates that the Customer Dimension Internet Sales is tagged with Customer Type “Web-based” as well as Customer Dimension Attribute “Sales Manager” with the value Matthew North.

A client’s level structure can also be designed with a Level Attribute “Region” and each level is then tagged with the specific Region Level-Attribute value.

An example of an Account Attribute (Applicable to GL and Custom Accounts) is a company which has to report to their accounting auditors with “Income” as the GL Account name, however for internal reporting it is referred to as “Revenue.” An Account Attribute “Name” can be applied to the “Revenue” (official name of the account in Adaptive) with the alternate “Income” tagged as the attribute value option on the Revenue GL Account.

The 6 rules of “Attributes”:

The attributes will never “hold” data – however are extremely valuable for report-sorting and formula creation requirements.
Attributes are not required.
There can be multiple attributes applied to the Level/Account/Dimension – the example of Dimension Customer with two attributes as displayed previously
When an attribute is applied/tagged to a parent/summary Level (for example) all the parents will inherit the parent’s attribute value and cannot be changed. When the attribute is tagged to a specific Level (for example) and the parent does not have an attribute tag, the child’s attribute can be changed.
Only one value can be applied for a single attribute tag.
When not in use, the attribute will be blank.

In summary, the differences between Dimensions and Attributes are many. Each has unique and important functionality in the instance and each requires thought and evaluation prior to developing the instance.

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.

FP&A Done Right: 5 Ways Dashboards Empower The Office of Finance

April 23, 2021 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

This is a guest blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning, exploring how to unlock hidden opportunities with dashboards & analytics.

Visualizing data is often the fastest way to identify trends and patterns that lead to insights and better decision making. That’s because the simple clarity of visualizing data via interactive dashboards can reveal hidden opportunities that likely would have been missed in more traditional analysis and sharing of data.

Here are five ways dashboards can help identify valuable insights that may have been overlooked in the past.

1. Dashboards encourage company-wide planning (or xP&A)

Simply making dashboards accessible to stakeholders throughout the organization represents a huge win in itself—and a significant step toward breaking down silos. Yet beyond that, increasing the number of people who have access to data presented in digestible formats exponentially increases the chances of those aha moments occurring. The production floor manager will surely have a different perspective than the CFO. When that perspective is informed with accessible data delivered via a dashboard, the stage is set for new efficiencies and improved productivity.

2. Dashboards show instead of tell

There’s a reason the phrases “go through the numbers” and “eyes glaze over” are often uttered in the same sentence. Traditionally, delivering financial information has largely been a one-way conversation with the finance team presenting mundane reports and data downloads. With the exception of the number crunchers in finance and accounting, many business partners get lost or disinterested when presented with a number or data overload. Dashboards avoid this challenge by elevating the data to the next level and using graphics and visualizations to clearly show data in formats that provide key context and clarity. When data gets presented in highly visual and familiar formats, business users can often quickly see challenges and opportunities that otherwise might have been missed.

3. Dashboards offer customized views for different thinkers

Different people consume information in a wide range of ways. Some may be more comfortable viewing data presented in standard bar, column, gauge, area, and doughnut charts. Yet others benefit from data presented in more engaging or interactive formats. Workday Adaptive Planning dashboards feature data visualization that includes funnels, dials, waterfalls, bubbles, histograms, radars, and Pareto charts. Users across locations and on any device can view data in the formats that connect with their unique way of learning and thinking.

4. Dashboards are ever-present

Even finance pros and business leaders who are adept at extracting insights from traditional reporting face the challenge of locating reports once they are filed away. And once people find the report, they have the time-consuming process of checking if the data is still accurate. Conversely, dashboards are continuously available via a wide range of devices with data updated in real time, assuring users that they are working with the latest available information. So if conditions change or a new opportunity arises, easy-to-access data visualization is there to support decision-making and reveal how an opportunity may be quickly leveraged.

5. Dashboards are inviting and simple to use

The simple power of dashboards is that they are easy to use and invite users to experiment, explore, and discover. By eliminating the complexity barrier, the odds of uncovering hidden opportunities expand dramatically. Ultimately, dashboards create the opportunity for self-service analysis for everyone. That allows any user to perform drilldown analytics, create period-to-period comparisons, and explore iterative what-if analyses that can effectively identify issues that need immediate attention while also identifying trends that could be leveraged through sales and targeted marketing efforts.

This blog post was originally published on the Workday Adaptive Planning blog.

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.

FP&A Done Right: Collaborate More When Planning

March 12, 2021 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

This is a guest blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning, recommending how to get other departments to collaborate with the Office of Finance.

When it comes to business, collaboration is vital. After all, no single department can do its job for long without the other departments pulling their own weight. Sales is no good if shipping can’t deliver; marketing falls flat if customer service keeps alienating users; everything grinds to a halt if human resources doesn’t provide the appropriate staffing.

But for some reason, when it comes to the numbers, it can feel like every department is on its own. Data is often stuck in silos, making it difficult or even impossible for other departments to get the information they need to do their jobs well.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the department that makes numbers its business: finance.

But achieving a collaborative finance function can be difficult. That’s because FP&A often lacks the necessary time, direction, or clarity around KPIs to build the cross-functional relationships required to improve forecasting and reporting. So what should be a team effort becomes a finance exercise, and when numbers change, it becomes finance’s fault. In the end, we lose credibility as a business partner.

Make Your Data Everyone’s Data

So how do you get other departments to collaborate with finance? Start by empowering your business partners with more ownership and accountability in the data and your process. For example, many businesses still do most of their forecasting and planning with spreadsheets. Not only is this wildly inefficient (not to mention more likely to include errors), but it keeps all the information bottled up on one person’s screen until they’re ready to share.

We all have seen an Excel spreadsheet named finalV2 or Final V3, only to find out our business partners are using FinalV6. This is a leading cause of number mismatch. Using modern finance tools, a finance team can collect and report on the numbers without needing to send and receive Excel spreadsheets. Everyone is on the same version and making the changes together. This just makes the business partners a part of the overall process, not part of the problem.

The more you can modernize your process and increase visibility into KPIs across the company, the more others will think of “our numbers” instead of “finance’s numbers.” When you create a single source of truth and share it, collaborators will be able to move past arguing about the numbers and start working together to decide on next steps.

A Strategic Bonus to Collaborative Finance

As a bonus, automation and dashboards for self-service collaborative reporting can vastly reduce the amount of transactional work the finance team has to accomplish each day. This frees up our time for both increased collaboration and providing the strategic, high-level analysis that helps move the company forward.

The bottom line: Financial collaboration becomes easier when you stop relying on static spreadsheets. It starts with getting the entire team working with one, trusted set of numbers, and building on a foundation of accurate, up to date data.

This blog post was originally published on the Workday Adaptive Planning blog and appeared here.

Check out more FP&A Done Right posts here:

FP&A Done Right: Five Tips for Budgeting in the Age of COVID

FP&A Done Right: To Recover from Economic Shock, Are CFOs Envisioning Enough Scenarios?

FP&A Done Right: Three Driver-based Budgeting Tips for CFOs when Change is Imminent

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: How to Create a Dimension

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Invaio Sciences Sows the Seeds of FP&A Transformation with Workday Adaptive Planning

Read more blog posts on Workday Adaptive Planning:

Texans Credit Union Adapts to Market Fluctuations with Workday Adaptive Planning

Read more blog posts on Workday Adaptive Planning:

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Crosstabs – The Significance of and How to Build

How to Build a Crosstab

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Data Integration and the Planning Data Source

To set up the credential you will need to do the following:

To set up the data source, you will need to do the following:

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Common Questions Asked During Training

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

FP&A Done Right: 5 Ways Dashboards Empower The Office of Finance