Adaptive Planning

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

February 22, 2023 by Ben Alcock

Dimension attributes in Workday Adaptive Planning are very helpful when we want to further separate data from the same dimension or give a hierarchy to a flat dimension. In this example, I use the dimension “New Jersey Apples.” We can tag each dimension value with an attribute that lets us know if it’s either a red apple or a green apple.

Select the three lines from next to the Workday W and navigate to modeling and dimension attributes. Click the Create new dimension attribute button

at the top of the sheet and name your attribute. In this example, our attribute name is apple colour.

Next, we need to populate our attribute values. Like when creating dimensions [add link to previous blog post], there are three methods for doing this.

The first is to do it manually. Select the create new attribute value button

from the top of the sheet. Next, create each attribute with a name and unique code. For example, red and green.

The second method is via an import. To do this, we need an import template. Click the Import dimension attribute 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 columns E and F, include the name and unique dimension value code 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 attributes!

The third approach is by far the easiest and fastest method. Select the check box Data import automatically creates new dimension attribute values:

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

And that’s it for creating dimensions attributes!

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Apex Entertainment Performs Enterprise Planning with Workday Adaptive Planning

February 9, 2023 by Revelwood

How do you move away from spreadsheet-based budgeting, forecasting and reporting for more insight into the operations of the business? With Workday Adaptive Planning.

Apex Entertainment, headquartered in Marlborough, MA, operates four family entertainment centers in the northeast U.S., including Virginia Beach, Syracuse, Albany and Marlborough. Apex offers attractions that are fun for all ages, with activities such as Indoor Go Karts, Bowling, Laser Tag, Escape Rooms, Ropes Courses, Arcade and Redemption, Sports Simulators, Axe Throwing, Mini Gold, Bumper Cars, Virtual Reality and state-of-the-art event meeting space. Each location offers a full-service dining experience in The Pit Stop Tavern, with a menu that includes 80 gluten-free options as well as vegetarian options.

“Relying on Microsoft Excel to manage our financial processes handicapped us more than helped us,” said Marcus Kemblowski, COO, Apex Entertainment. “We needed a solution that gave us insight into how to fix problems and would enable us to manage our business in real-time.”

Apex Entertainment selected Workday Adaptive Planning and Revelwood. The goal of the implementation was to easily see how the business is doing, down to the location and the attraction. Now, with Workday Adaptive Planning, Apex Entertainment has the information available to make strategic decisions. The team can analyze and assess potential expenses regarding forecasted revenue by activity.

“From the get-go, Revelwood clearly understood our business. They immediately knew what we were discussing and hot to get us to where we needed to go,” added Kemblowski.

Apex Entertainment is not done with its plans for Workday Adaptive Planning. “Workday Adaptive Planning can help us to get where we want to go,” commented Kemblowski. “We now can easily perform top-line to bottom-line budgeting and forecasting. The insights generated by the application are invaluable to the company’s growth.

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

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!

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: Creating an Excel File Data Source

September 14, 2022 by Dave Miersch

Did you know you can create an Excel file spreadsheet data source for Workday Adaptive Planning?

Watch Dave Miersch, Revelwood’s Practice Leader for Workday Adaptive Planning, demonstrate how to create and use an Excel file as a data source for Adaptive Planning. Dave shows you how to:

Use any data source, such as from an ERP system or data warehouse
Create a new data source
Find and select the spreadsheet option
Name the data source
Import the spreadsheet

Adaptive Planning makes it very easy to import and export an Excel spreadsheet!

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Loan Amortization

July 6, 2022 by Robert Nordhagen Leave a Comment

Loan amortization schedules in Workday Adaptive Planning are slightly different than those done in Excel.

In Excel the typical amortization schedule looks like this:

In Workday Adaptive Planning most versions only go 1-5 years into the future. Creating a complete 10-25 year amortization schedule is not the best practice. Here is an example of an Amortization Schedule in Adaptive:

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In Adaptive we show inputs in rows 2-8. Rows 10 through 14 are the formulas that calculate the interest per period, the principle and the declining principal balance.

Row 2: Input the initial loan balance for every month the loan will be active. If you are keying it in, as opposed to uploading a file from Excel, you can use Copy Forward rather than key it in every month.

Row 3: Input Balance (if acquiring the loan). Instead of the initial balance, put the balance as of assumption date.

Row 4: Principal Payment. This is used for variable rate loans

Row 5: The months will be the same just like the Initial Balance for every month that the loan is active.

Row 6: Amort Month is a counter that increases by 1 each month until the loan matures, then the field should go blank. In most cases the version will max out before the loan matures.

Row 7: Interest Rate %. This will be the same every month for fixed rate loans. For variable rate, forecast the expected rate by month.

Row 8: Draw Down. This is for additional payments.

The formula rows will calculate as follows:

Row 10: Beginning balance is equal to prior month ending balance.

Row 11: Total Payment. This is the most complicated formula and takes many scenarios into account using nested ifs. The basis of the formula is the payment formula; ie, Balance x i / ( (1+i) * (1- 1/( 1+I )^n ))

Row 12: Interest Payment. This takes the Beginning Balance * the Interest rate (monthly rate: rate/12)

Row 13: Principal Payment. This takes Total Payment – Interest Payment

Row 14: Ending Balance. This takes the Beginning Balance – Principal Payment – Draw Down

Follow up to Amortization is Conversion to Straight Line

Previously, we showed how to do a loan amortization in Adaptive Planning. Now we will go to the next step: Straight-line the interest according to GAAP in certain situations. Below is a loan amortization that takes the loan payments to maturity. The interest payments are summed. That sum is then divided evenly among the payments and the amortization schedule is redone with constant interest every month as shown in the second schedule.

This is tricky in Adaptive Planning because a typical Excel schedule is run out to term since there are almost always sufficient columns in an Excel sheet to handle all the monthly payments. However, in Adaptive Planning, a typical version will be only 3 to 5 years into the future so only loans within 60 months of maturity could follow the same pattern.

For any longer maturities we have to apply the following logic. For loans with a constant monthly payment (which is most loans), calculate the payment. Then multiply the payment by the number of payments such as $9541.10 * 120 months, which is equal to $1,144,932.00 (slightly different by $0.37 due to rounding). Subtract the initial balance $1,144,932 – $1,000,000 = $144,932 which is the total of the interest. Now the Interest Payment will be equal to the total interest divided by the number of payments as seen below.

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Now the GL account for Interest Expense can be linked to SL_Interest_Pmt and the GAAP reporting of Straight Line interest will be in the P&L.

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Choose the Correct TIME Syntax

June 22, 2022 by Michelle Song Leave a Comment

Are you familiar with all the TIME syntax in Workday Adaptive Planning? Do you know what is the best practice for each of them? This blog post will tell you the difference between them.

Below are the most common TIME syntax in Adaptive Planning.

Month(this)
Versionmonth(this) – returns the
This.year.positionof(this.month)
This.version.positionof(this.month)

In the following example, this instance has a custom calendar which is from July – June. The example is created using Month as the stratum. The same logics are applied to Quarter and Year.

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In July 2021, Month(this) returns the month in the standard calendar, which is month 7. This syntax also assumes that July is from July 1^st to July 31^st. For example, if 7/30/2021 in a custom calendar is actually a date in Aug 2021, then versionmonth(July-2021) and versionmonth(Aug-2021) will return the same number. This same situation also applies to Versionmonth(this).

Versionmonth(this) returns the month of the version, which also follows the standard calendar and assumes July is from July 1^st to July 31^st.

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This.year.positionof(this.month) returns the fiscal month of the year, which is month 1 for July-2021. This syntax references the custom calendar. For example, if 7/30/2021 in a custom calendar is actually a date in Aug 2021, then This.year.positionof(this.month) returns month 2 in the year, which is Aug 2021. Same situation applies to This.version.positionof(this.month).

This.version.positionof(this.month) returns the month in the version since the Start of Version. In this case, the Start of Version is July 2021, therefore it is month 1 in the version.

Other use cases and helpful formulas related to time.

Personnel Sheet:

For Headcount calculation that has a Custom Calendar and Start Date before the system date
- this.Year.positionof(this.Month) – correct result, but shown as RED (error) on Income Statement because the date is outside of the system date.
- versionmonth(this) – might result in incorrect result due to date overlaps in two months.
- Use iff(ROW.PartialHeadcount>0, 1,0) as a workaround.
Cumulative Salary
- Standard calendar:

iff(month(this)>1, ROW.Salary+ROW.CumulativeSalary[time=this-1], ROW.Salary)

Customized calendar:

iff(this.Year.positionof(this.Month)>1,ROW.Salary+ROW.CumulativeSalary[time=this-1], ROW.Salary)

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

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Apex Entertainment Performs Enterprise Planning with Workday Adaptive Planning

Read more blog posts on Workday Adaptive Planning:

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: Creating an Excel File Data Source

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Loan Amortization

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Choose the Correct TIME Syntax

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

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