Budgeting Planning & Forecasting

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Adding and Editing Connection URLs in Planning Analytics for Excel

August 2, 2022 by Marc Assenza Leave a Comment

Do you know how to add a new Connection URL or Edit an existing Connection URL in Planning Analytics for Excel? Here are the steps to follow:

Adding a Connection URL

Once Planning Analytics for Excel has been launched, go into the IBM Planning Analytics ribbon click on the “Connect” button. Click the “New Connection” button within the drop down menu.

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The following window will appear.

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Datasource type – This is a dropdown containing two selections: IBM Planning Analytics and IBM Cognos Analytics. For this example, we are connecting to IBM Planning Analytics.

Connection URL – The connection URL connects Planning Analytics for Excel to a Planning Analytics Workspace server. If you are connecting to a local installation of Planning Analytics Workspace, this will contain either the IP address of your Planning Analytics Workspace server or the machine name of your Planning Analytics Workspace server, examples could look as follows:

http://12.345.77.89
http://mypawserver.mycompany.com

If you are connecting to an IBM Cloud Planning Analytics Workspace Server, the connection URL would look something like this:

https://mycompanyname.planning-analytics.ibmcloud.com/

Friendly name – The friendly name is a user defined setting in the sense that you give it a name that people within the organization would recognize, and it would be something meaningful to them, an example could be:

mycompanyname DEV Server

Once the information is entered, press the Test Connection button to confirm your connection. A successful connection will result in the following message:

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Once completed, click the “Save” button.

Editing a Connection URL

Occasionally you may need to edit an existing connection URL. This may entail a change to your internal “Friendly name” or a change to the IP address of the server. Here are the steps to follow:

Once Planning Analytics for Excel has been launched, go into the IBM Planning Analytics ribbon click on the “Options” button.

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Click on the option for “IBM” on the left-hand side of the window.

You will see a list of all your existing connections. Select the connection you want to edit and click the “Edit” button at the bottom of the screen. You can then make the necessary adjustments and retest the connection.

Revelwood has worked with IBM Planning Analytics / TM1 for more than 27 years. We’ve partnered with hundreds of companies on the design, development, maintenance and updates of IBM Planning Analytics applications, across every industry. Have a challenge with Planning Analytics / TM1? We can help you!

Modern Accounting: Four Key Ways AR Automations Propel Financial Operations

July 28, 2022 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

This is a guest blog post from our partner BlackLine, explaining four ways AR automation moves financial operations forward.

Due to challenges in recent years, there’s been a shift in the way companies approach people retention—with varying outcomes.

Many organizations now offer hybrid working policies, with employees enjoying more flexibility throughout their weeks, even if it’s just the ability to do laundry at lunchtime.

On the flip side, the uncertainty and disruption has caused others to become fed up, leading them to move on to new pastures. We’re all aware of The Great Resignation—but what does this mean for AR and finance teams?

Time-consuming manual processes are a significant factor in this fight. With employees struggling to hit targets and respond to customers on time, plus battling siloed systems that don’t provide full visibility into business procedures, it’s easy to see why they’re cutting loose.

It’s clear that to retain staff and streamline operational processes, digital transformation is no longer a nice-to-have—it’s a must-have.

Banish Back-Office Blues with AR Automation

AR automation raises the bar in business performance.

By moving AR to a different beat, businesses can make small changes to their every day that triggers a big change their operational success. Not only that but automating AR can inform more strategic decision-making and drive better financial outcomes—a win-win for both people and business.

It’s time to MOVE on from manual:

M—making better decisions

O—operational success

V—visibility into the future

E—employee satisfaction

And AR is for automating.

1. Making Better Decisions

Let’s be honest: most manual AR practices don’t lead to effective data utilization. And few companies have the necessary tools to make best use of their available data, or action the insights it gives them.

AR automation can fill this gap. By surfacing critical information that is typically difficult to obtain, finance leaders can improve strategic decision making across all areas of business.

This leads to better business outcomes all around, as well as helping you to identify potential growth areas within your existing customer base.

2. Operational Success

Unnecessary process errors. Duplicated effort. Customer disputes. These are just some of the AR challenges your staff are tasked with that can have a serious company-wide impact.

Automating repetitive tasks results in less complications to deal with. Teams can more promptly resolve customer disputes, building better relationships and elevating business reliability and reputation.

On top of this, teams are not only better placed to hit their targets but are also able to dedicate more of their time and energy into work that really makes a difference.

3. Visibility Into the Future

Senior board members are tasked with, among other things, keeping external shareholders happy. They’re (understandably) mostly concerned about revenue, and that is directly informed by a healthy cash flow.

AR automation gives you full insight into your cash position, providing you with everything you need to deliver detailed reporting to shareholders.

Not only could this help secure future investment, but it also contributes towards financial resilience. The more you know about your cash position, the more informed decisions you can make to protect your business.

4. Employee Satisfaction

While WFH has generally gone down a storm, hybrid working can throw up just as many pitfalls as perks. With staff split between home and office, siloed teams may not have full visibility over entire processes, damaging collaboration and significantly hampering productivity.

By implementing AR automation that takes care of admin under one unified platform, staff can take care of adding value elsewhere, putting their expertise to best use: achieving financial goals.

Plus, with staff feeling happier and more supported, they’re less likely to become another ‘Great Resignation’ statistic—and you won’t lose out on all the best talent.

By moving to a different beat with BlackLine, you’re realizing the true potential of AR: as an integral back-office function that contributes significantly to business success.

This blog post was originally published on the BlackLine blog.

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Excel DELET Function

July 26, 2022 by Lee Lazarow Leave a Comment

A while back I wrote a blog about the SCAN function which showed how you can search for specific characters and then combine this with the SUBST formula to create new sets of text. But what if you wanted an easier way to simply skip some characters within the string? This can be done with the DELET function.

The DELET function is used to delete a set of characters from within a string. The syntax of the command is:

DELET (string, start, number)

String = the source text string
Start = the character where deletion will begin
Number = the number of characters to delete

For example:

DELETE (‘phone’, 2, 3) returns ‘pe’

This function can be used to perform tasks such as removing dashes in between an element code number and name or removing a prefix from a list of elements. This will simplify your code by allowing you to simply ignore some text instead of merging two substrings together.

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

July 20, 2022 by Marc Assenza Leave a Comment

Did you know that Workday Adaptive Planning can use Microsoft Excel Workbooks as Data Sources for Data Integration?

It’s true! The process is surprisingly simple if a few basic rules and steps are followed:

Your column names, positions, and formatting should remain consistent once you decide upon the layout. In the example below, Period, Value, Account and Level will always be in the same order with the same consistent formatting on a moving forward basis.

The name of your worksheet within the workbook will need to remain the same. Within the Workday Adaptive integration, the worksheet name becomes the table name in the Design Integrations task pane. As a side note, if you have multiple worksheets as part of a workbook, each worksheet becomes an available table to use for that spreadsheet data source. See screenshot below:

ALL row and column values must be exactly that, values. There cannot be any formulas or summed totals on the spreadsheet

Import your Spreadsheet data source through the easy-to-use Actions Pane link named “Import Spreadsheet.”

Follow the automated prompting.

Ensure your workbook was uploaded by viewing it in the Data Sources data pane.

Open your Data Source and locate your table from the Data Components Pane.

Drag your table into the Staging area to review and query the data.

That’s all it takes to import an Excel Workbook as an Excel Spreadsheet Data Source. Be on the lookout for more Workday Adaptive Data Integration tips and tricks from me in the future!

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.

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: PAW Escape Character

July 5, 2022 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

Have you ever been in a situation where you have an element name with an apostrophe (or two) in IBM Planning Analytics? Examples of this might entail last names such as “O’Connor” or “O’Sullivan”?

Although IBM best practices specify that the apostrophe is a special character to avoid in object and element names, in many instances you’ll see an apostrophe used in your data source (especially in names and brand names).

Planning Analytics confuses the apostrophe as a single quote … which is a special character used to define literal strings. You can resolve this situation by using an “escape character.” An escape character invokes an alternative interpretation on the characters which follow.

The Planning Analytics escape character sequence defines 2 single quotes together as the equivalent of 1 single quote.

Example:

‘O’’Connor’ will display as ‘O’Connor’

This escape sequence can be used in both Rules and Turbo Integrator processes.

This approach will allow your use of O’Connor to properly work instead of causing you to convert it into “oh darn”!

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Introduction to Apps and Plans

March 16, 2021 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

As of version 58 of IBM Planning Analytics Workspace (PAW), IBM introduced new features called Applications and Plans. These are meant to guide business processes by centralizing and organizing required tasks to make sure that all steps are completed in the correct sequence.

To access the area, click on the Applications and Plans pane on the homepage when you first log onto PAW.

IBM Planning Analytics Workspace: Introduction to Apps and Plans

On the next page, you can create a new application or plan by clicking on the “Create” drop down and selecting the appropriate option.

Before you can add to your application or plan, you must enter a name.

For applications, you can add “sections” to your process. Each section corresponds to a step in your business process. You can add assets such as PAW views, websheets, or books for users to access easily. You can also assign PAW groups to each step to show who is responsible for completing that task.

Plans are similar to applications, but they also provide the ability to set due dates and allow for submissions as a form of approval or completion notice.

So when would you use each type?

Applications are designed to be used as a guide for set business processes that do not depend on multiple groups. Examples include CAR requests, monthly forecasting steps, cost center requests, or variance reviews.
Plans are for collaboration in which the steps are dependent upon each other or other groups. This is typically the annual budget process and special projects such as mergers and acquisitions which require steps to be completed in a timely manner.

IBM Planning Analytics, which TM1 is the engine for, is full of new features and functionality. Not sure where to start? Our team here at Revelwood can help. Contact us for more information at info@revelwood.com. And stay tuned for more Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks weekly in our Knowledge Center and in upcoming newsletters!

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

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Planning Analytics Forecasting – Setting up the Forecast

March 9, 2021 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

This is part three in a three-part series on IBM Planning Analytics’ new feature, Forecasting.

In our previous blog about IBM Planning Analytics’ new Forecasting feature, we reviewed the steps required to preview your forecast. Once previewed, you can then run your Forecast.

Open a Planning Analytics Workspace (PAW) book and add a new cube view.
Place the time dimension’s flat hierarchy alone on the columns. As of PAW version 2.0.60, you will no longer be required to display the entire hierarchy on the view. Instead, you will have the option to select the scope of the historical data used in the forecast.
Select the context and row elements to forecast. For example:
- Drag the account dimension on top of the source dimension to swap their positions.
- Click on the version dimension to select a different version of the data from the drop-down list.
- Double-click on the account dimension to select the row elements.

Your PAW cube view is now ready as a Planning Analytics Forecasting model.

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Adding and Editing Connection URLs in Planning Analytics for Excel

Adding a Connection URL

Editing a Connection URL

Read more IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: