Adaptive Insights

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Linked Accounts with Link Filter

August 14, 2024 by Revelwood

Linked accounts serve as the backbone of financial modeling in Workday Adaptive Planning. They establish connections between different elements of your financial structure, enabling seamless aggregation and analysis of data across various dimensions. By linking accounts, you can bring data from different models to align for your organization’s reporting and analysis needs.

Understanding Link Filters

Link filters fall under linked accounts as filters for any dimensionality you have for the model. You can bring in data for specific dimensions you want to see applied to your planning accounts and exclude those you do not. This is especially useful for CapEx and OpEx models where dimensions such as asset type and contract type are used.

Linking Asset with Link Filter to Income Statement

Let’s use the CapEx model as an example. To have the CapEx model reflect on the GL accounts we will have to do a Link. To link the model data to the GL we will have to navigate to:

Modeling > GL accounts > “Expense Depreciation – Furniture & Fixtures.” Within that account details > Type = Link > Add

Select the corresponding model you want to reference as well as the account.

Link the Monthly depreciation with the corresponding asset class in the link filter. In this case, we will apply the filter of Asset Class: “Furniture & Fixtures.” If there is an existing depreciation, link that as well from the capital summary sheet. The GL Account will show the total depreciation amount from the respective capital planning models for just assets with the class “Furniture & Fixtures.”

With linked accounts and link filters, data can be managed efficiently from different models and allows for more flexible and consistent reporting.

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.

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Metadata Loaders

October 4, 2023 by Julia Seelin

A key component of Workday Adaptive Planning is the ability to pull in actual data through integration. However, there is more you can do with this access to the data source. There is the ability to load in dimensions from the data source and have them automatically added to that specific dimension. This is done through a Metadata Loader. A Metadata Loader can only bring in one dimension at a time, but it will connect to an existing dimension and add any new values that are loaded into the data source.

In order to create this loader, the correct data table must be brought in the source data, as depicted below.

The next step consists of creating the planning dimension loader and filling out the Data Source Settings for the dimension. You would select the newly added data table as the source table. You then select the planning dimension it correlates with already in the instance.

Lastly, you map the columns, based on the source table, to ensure the necessary details are pulled in.

In order to ensure the correct names and codes are being pulled in correctly, it is recommended to run a preview of the output. If the loader was done correctly, a file will be produced that displays the desired information. From here, the loader is ready to be added to a task so that it will run as often as desired.

Revelwood is an award-winning, Platinum Workday Adaptive Planning partner. We build solutions for the Office of Finance that minimize your risk by seamlessly incorporating business analytics into your everyday thinking. Combining the software with our best practices and out-of-the-box applications, we help businesses achieve their full potential with Workday Adaptive Planning.

Streamlining Nonprofit Financial Planning with Workday Adaptive Planning

August 9, 2023 by Revelwood

Nonprofit organizations play a vital role in our society, but managing their finances can be a complex task. To ensure responsible fiscal management and transparency, nonprofits need efficient and accurate budgeting, planning, and reporting systems. Many non-profit organizations have selected Workday Adaptive Planning for planning, forecasting and reporting. By leveraging the advanced features of Workday Adaptive Planning, nonprofits can streamline their financial planning processes, gain real-time visibility, and make data-driven decisions to support their mission.

The Challenges of Nonprofit Financial Management

Nonprofits face unique challenges in managing their finances. They must handle multiple funds, programs, and locations while planning for different grant sizes and distributions. Traditional spreadsheet-based systems are prone to human error, are time-consuming and lack the scalability required for active planning and reporting. These limitations can hinder nonprofits’ ability to operate within their means, demonstrate transparency to donors and stakeholders and adapt to changing circumstances effectively.

Workday Adaptive Planning: Empowering Nonprofits

Workday Adaptive Planning offers a powerful solution specifically tailored to meet the planning needs of nonprofit organizations. With its multidimensional, driver-based modeling capabilities, nonprofits can accurately plan revenues and expenses across their complex organizational structures. The integration of profit and loss (P&L) and cash flow planning ensures accurate cash projections, enabling nonprofits to make informed financial decisions.

Workday Adaptive Planning also facilitates detailed staff planning, allowing organizations to allocate resources and report on fully loaded costs by employee. It empowers budget owners by providing them with ownership of the planning process, fostering collaboration and accountability within the organization.

Enhanced Visibility and Real-time Analytics

One of the key advantages of Workday Adaptive Planning is its ability to provide real-time visibility through a flexible and intuitive interface. Nonprofits can analyze key drivers across various aspects of their organization, generating reports at varying levels of granularity. This visibility allows them to identify variances between planned and actual behavior, enabling proactive adjustments to stay on track with their financial goals.

Workday Adaptive Planning empowers nonprofit organizations to streamline their financial planning processes, gain clear insights into their financials, and demonstrate responsible fiscal management. By leveraging this comprehensive solution, nonprofits can optimize their budgeting, planning, and reporting, supporting their mission and making a positive impact in the communities they serve.

Learn more about how Workday Adaptive Planning can help your non-profit organization. Join us on Thursday, August 24, 2023, at 2:00pm for a webinar on Upgrading Non-Profit FP&A Efficiency with Workday Adaptive Planning.

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: 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.

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

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.

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.”

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.

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!

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.

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: Linked Accounts with Link Filter

Understanding Link Filters

Linking Asset with Link Filter to Income Statement

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Metadata Loaders

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Streamlining Nonprofit Financial Planning with Workday Adaptive Planning

The Challenges of Nonprofit Financial Management

Workday Adaptive Planning: Empowering Nonprofits

Enhanced Visibility and Real-time Analytics

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: 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:

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