Budgeting

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Using Words and Numbers Together

June 2, 2020 by Lee Lazarow Leave a Comment

In an IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks video, I demonstrated the concept of using words to manipulate your views. This approach also applies to entering data. All of you know that you can enter data by typing a number into a writeable cell.

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Using Words and Numbers

Some of you know that you can use commands such as “2k” to enter a value that will be converted into a number.

IBM Planning Analytics Tips: Using Words and Numbers

And some of you also know that you can type commands such as “grow10” on an existing number to populate the rest of the year.

IBM Planning Analytics Tricks: Using Words and Numbers

But did you know that you can merge all of this together into a single entry? For example, if I type “5kgrow20” in January then 5,000 will be input into January and a 20 percent growth rate will apply to each of the other months.

Using words and numbers in IBM Planning Analytics

The combination of numbers and phrases in a single cell will help you quickly and easily create plans for multiple time periods.

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! You can also sign up to get our Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks sent directly to your inbox!

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: The Data Load Process

May 26, 2020 by Lee Lazarow Leave a Comment

In an IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks video, I showed how to use a drag and drop approach to load data into a cube. Since that time, the wizard has been updated to allow you to save your import as a new TurboIntegrator process and to also schedule the process within a chore.

After dragging the file onto the cube, the first screen that appears is a confirmation of the file with some file-based setup aspects such as the delimiter, the quote character and the number of header rows:

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: The Data Load Process

After clicking the continue button, the second screen appears which allows you to define the columns and aspects associated with the data load (before and during):

The Data Load Process in IBM Planning Analytics

The bottom, right corner of this screen allows you to save the import as a process and/or a chore:

IBM Planning Analytics Tips: The Data Load Process

Once executed, the process will be saved and can be referenced using PAW’s process functionality:

IBM Planning Analytics Tricks: The Data Load Process

This approach within Planning Analytics allows you to use a drag and drop approach to create and save Planning Analytics code.

FP&A Done Right: 3 Words for a COVID-19 World – “Flexible Budget Variance”

May 22, 2020 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

This is a guest blog post from our partner Adaptive Insights, written by Bob Hansen. It is part of a series of blogs from Adaptive Insights designed to help customers weather the storm brought by the COVID-19 pandemic.

With the COVID-19 pandemic shredding budget forecasts and presenting FP&A professionals with actuals that are nowhere close to original expectations, now is the perfect time to get acquainted with a certain term: “Flexible budget variance.”

Sure, flexible budget variance might sound wonky. But now more than ever, it’s an essential tool for modern FP&A teams. Here’s why.

Flexible budgeting not only helps you stay current with the challenges and opportunities that surface throughout the year, but it can be a lifeline when your business is rocked by revenue shocks, drops in demand, workforce shifts, and whatever else a global event can toss your way. By updating budgets to reflect those changes, you can quickly course correct to improve efficiency or enhance performance.

What is a flexible budget variance?

Flexible budget variances are the differences between line items on actual financial statements and those that are on flexible budgets. Since the actual activity level is not available before the accounting period closes, flexible budgets can only be prepared at the end of the period. At that point, flexible budget variances can be useful in identifying any shortcomings or deviations in actual performance during a given period.

Though powerful anytime, you can imagine how useful this capability would be now, with so much disruption to normal course of business activity. And it’s a safe bet that business planning and budgeting overall will be subject to rapid and ongoing course correction for months to come.

Flexible budget variance is also beneficial during the planning stage at the beginning of the accounting period. By adjusting project budgets to a series of possible activity levels, Finance creates data that helps anticipate the impact of changes in activity levels on revenues and costs. This helps you make more informed decisions if (or when) adjustments are needed.

Taking a flexible approach to budgeting typically doesn’t mean you get a free pass when it comes to more traditional, static budgeting. In fact, the static budget is essential for establishing a baseline to measure performance and results and ultimately for calculating the variances that do occur throughout the year.

Save time by using the tools you have

The task of calculating, analyzing, and then clearly communicating budget variances and their implications can be a time-consuming task under any circumstances, and particularly stressful in times of disruption. But certain capabilities in Workday Adaptive Planning make it easier.

For instance, Workday Adaptive Planning’s data visualization software can speed much of that process. And when conditions change quickly, speed is a distinct advantage.

Even so, it’s important to keep in mind that not all line items in a budget can be flexible. For example, your company has many expenses that are likely fixed for the entire year, such as rent or contractual obligations.

Yet other expenses have considerable chance of varying to one degree or another. For instance, staffing projections may be dependent on an expected long-term contract being finalized, or economic stresses cause you to extend payment deadlines or loosen return policies. No matter what, flexibility serves you at the moment you need it—and pays dividends down the line.

Gain meaningful insights

Meanwhile, flexible budget variance analysis offers the ability to derive meaningful insights throughout the year, allowing for improved planning and budgeting for the future. The power and potential of flexible budgets are further fueled by technology platforms such as those offered by Workday that provide drill-down capabilities so you can quickly identify and analyze variances.

You can also use Workday Adaptive Planning to create a variance report that highlights the changes in dashboards, offering a range of visual options for presenting the numbers within highly accessible context.

And by relying on more timely and relevant budget numbers, you can use flexible budgets to provide senior executives and line of business managers with dynamic guidance on spending, investments, or where cost controls might be necessary based on the situation your business faces as days, weeks, and months progress.

You’ll get through this chaos by leveraging the benefits of flexible budget variance capabilities within Workday Adaptive Planning, you even might get through it in a stronger position than your competitors.

This blog post was originally published by Adaptive Insights.

FP&A Done Right: Traditional Budgeting is a Challenge

May 1, 2020 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

This is a guest blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning, written by Gary Cokins. Cokins explains why traditional budgeting is no longer adequate for most companies.

Traditional budgeting is simply too slow and too rigid to keep up with today’s rapidly changing business environment. There is great volatility, complexity, and uncertainty in the future. Gone are the days when budgets could be one-and-done — tied to a fixed point in time and too inflexible to adjust to quickly changing business opportunities and challenges. In today’s world, a startup can be up and running and profitable in three months and disrupt its competitors. Consider Uber and Airbnb as examples. If your company takes nearly as long to develop an annual budget, it will be extremely difficult to fight off the upstarts or keep up with your established competitors.

The solution? A flexible, continuous budgeting and forecasting process that helps you anticipate change and focus on outcomes rather than outputs. Rolling financial forecasts are emerging as a valuable planning method to augment the annual budget.

Here are five tips to modernize your budget process:

Tip 1 – Just say no to one-and-done

Now more than ever, December’s fiscal year-end budget numbers often bear little resemblance to July’s realities—requiring more streamlined, accurate, and responsive budgets and forecasts. Annual budgeting won’t go away, but spending weeks and months processing data and reconciling spreadsheets that are out of date soon after the consolidated master budget is published doesn’t cut it anymore.

Modern budget solution:
● Increase the frequency of budgets and forecasts to reflect shifting business conditions
● Make decisions and plans based on data-backed insights rather than old and stale information
● Change how resources are allocated throughout the year and how it incorporates real-time opportunities and challenges

Tip 2 – Focus on business drivers, not cost centers

Traditional budgeting focuses on allocating resources to cost centers, but business objectives (e.g., projects, products, service lines) are cross-functional with end-to-end business processes. By assigning resources to projects and processes, budgets and forecasts reflect company-wide versus cost-center specific performance.

Modern budget solution:
● Enable organization-wide access to reports and data that allows everyone to have visibility into project-level and process-level performance
● Review forecasts against project and process budgets to eliminate confusion among competing departments
● Provide real-time information for the needed insights to support better decision-making at all levels of the organization

Tip 3 – Create rolling forecasts

More than ever, fluctuating market conditions make accurate forecasts extremely challenging. Rolling financial forecasts help manage funds and provide visibility into business performance using time horizons that reflect the speed of your business.

Modern budget solution:
● Generate rolling financial forecasts that accommodate real-time shifts in market conditions
● Enable self-service reporting so everyone in the organization can measure their performance against companywide KPIs
● Help everyone understand the downstream effects of their resource allocation decisions

Tip 4 – Look forward, not back

Most budgets and forecasts are outdated before you push “publish” or soon afterward. And some factors are impossible to take into account (natural disasters, broken supply chains, work stoppages). The rear-view mirror orientation of traditional budgeting (last year’s actuals create this year’s budgets) can’t keep up with the speed of modern business. Look through the windshield.

Modern budget solution:
● Respond faster to shifts in market conditions with real-time access to financials
● Adjust outdated budgets and forecasts as change occurs
● Move leadership discussions toward insight, planning, and action, rather than using the budget as a cost control mechanism

Tip 5 – Use the right tools for the job

Creating a budget process that keeps up with the pace of today’s business requires a comprehensive, collaborative, and continuous planning platform—one that gives you robust, accessible reporting and modeling capabilities; dashboards that provide visibility into overall company performance; and automated tools that streamline budgeting and forecasting processes.

Modern budget solution:
● Enable comprehensive planning that aligns the priorities and actions of everyone across the organization around common KPIs
● Create opportunities for collaboration by giving everyone access to the data they need and deserve
● Adjust and update budgets and forecasts on a continuous basis so you can navigate volatile market conditions in real time

Don’t let traditional budgeting lock you into outdated assumptions and fixed targets. Some managers view the fiscal year budget as a “contract” with handcuffs that they cannot get out of to minimize unfavorable variances from their allotted cost center budget expenses. This short-term focus jeopardizes the longer-term view. The modern FP&A professional knows the truth: Aligning budgets and forecasts with comprehensive plans lays the groundwork for proactive rather than reactive planning—a significant strategic advantage in today’s highly competitive environment.

Gary Cokins is an internationally recognized expert, speaker, and author in enterprise and corporate performance management (EPM/CPM) systems. He is the founder of Analytics-Based Performance Management LLC. Gary can be reached at gcokins@garycokins.com

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

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Sparklines

April 28, 2020 by Dillon Rossman Leave a Comment

Are you familiar with Sparklines, a rarely used feature in Excel?

What happens when you’d like to provide a visual representation of data but don’t necessarily want, or have the space, for a big chart? Sparklines may be a viable solution.

To add a Sparkline for data, follow these steps:

Once you have your data, navigate to the Insert Tab > Sparklines. In this scenario a Line Sparkline will be used but there are also options for Column and Win-Loss Sparklines.
Once selected, a dialogue box will show two fields:
1. A. Data Range – Data that will appear in the Sparkline
2. B. Location Range – Where the Sparkline will be placed
After filling out the necessary fields, a Sparkline will be created, and the Sparkline Tab will appear. This provides several options to change the appearance of a Sparkline.

Implementing Sparklines is a very easy and effective way to visualize data without the need for charts.

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Bulk Load Template for Cubes with Indices

April 21, 2020 by Thanh Chau Leave a Comment

Do you have cubes in your IBM Planning Analytics (PA) model that allow for planning with line item detail? The struggle you may come across in creating a template in Excel that automatically loads to the next available line is that such a template will either not allow you to load in bulk or requires you to load to only one center or account combination at a time. Using PA’s Quick Report, you can create an input template that solves both obstacles.

In implementing a Quick Report load template solution, you must include a Count measure in your cube to track which indices are currently used.

Create your Quick Report so that the Index dimension and other dimensions that constitute a unique index row are in the rows and the other dimensions are in the columns. In the example below, every new item entered for a center will require its own index row. The Measure, Version, and Time dimensions are in the columns.

IBM Planning Analytics Tips: How to Bulk Load Cubes with Indices

In the first row, hard-code a dummy line that will not be included in reporting or will not receive any inputs. The reason for this is that a Quick Report always needs at least one data row to maintain the connection to the cube. You can format this row and change the row height to have it appear as a thick border to your users.

IBM Planning Analytics Tricks: Bulk Load Templates for Cubes with Indices

Lastly, for every row that you’d like to be a part of the load area, populate the Index column with a formula that will determine the next row number by pulling the Count measure of “Total Index” for the center, adding the number of times the center appears in the rows above the current row, and add one to increment to the next index.

You can hide the Index column as this column will no longer be controlled by the user.

FP&A Done Right: Spreadsheets are Outdated

April 17, 2020 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

This is a guest blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning, written by Adaptive Insights’ Founder Rob Hull. It was originally published on FEI Daily.

The global marketplace is moving faster, requiring companies to be more agile than ever in this age of urgency. Yet businesses—and specifically finance teams—still rely on tools that sustained them decades ago. Those tools were designed for an age when planning was an annual, top-down and linear process, but today we no longer have the luxury of devoting an average of 77 days to develop an annual plan. Change is continuous, so planning must be too. And it must also be more collaborative.

The rapid change in our technological ecosystem is causing a growing number of finance chiefs to tell their staff to find tools better suited to modern business planning and analysis than spreadsheets — for decades the default planning application for virtually every business. The inconveniences of spreadsheets for planning and analysis, such as version control errors stemming from manual data entry, clumsy email collaboration, and the challenges of creating a single source of truth from disparate data sources can now be a distant memory thanks to modern planning tools. As Bernard Marr observed in Forbes, spreadsheets may still be a great choice for some tasks, but not for the kind of agile planning and analytics required in today’s fast paced business environment.

From the cloud, a different way to plan

These and other observers have pointed to the rise of cloud-based planning software that has taken the fundamental capabilities of the noble spreadsheet and turned them into something that spreadsheets never quite managed to be – automated, intuitive, collaborative, integrated, multi-dimensional, and always up to date. Just as cloud-based CRM applications like Salesforce.com replaced legacy applications like Siebel, so too are cloud planning solutions replacing spreadsheets and legacy applications to provide much needed agility in today’s era of urgency.

Spreadsheets are a wonderful personal productivity tool, and as such will continue to have a place among business applications. But for company-wide finance, sales, and workforce planning, reporting and analysis, the future will look different than the past.

The future of planning is unfolding

With the advancement in technology, we’re starting to see menial tasks accomplished through automation, making time for teams to spend on high value tasks. Finance execs report that, on average, 83 percent of their staff’s time is spent on manual, menial tasks like data input and consolidation. That’s lost time that could be converted to more valuable and strategic tasks with better tools for planning, reporting and analysis.

Pinsent Masons LLP, a UK-based law firm with offices throughout Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Australia, found that swapping out spreadsheets for cloud-based planning, reporting and analysis helped automate previously manual tasks, freeing finance staff to be more strategic. “We spent 70 percent of our time entering and verifying data, and 30 percent viewing and interpreting it,” notes Andrew Brett, who heads financial reporting at Pinsent Masons. “We now can spend seven out of every 10 hours gleaning insight from our data.”

Meanwhile, anytime, anywhere access and intuitive application design make planning far more collaborative. Spreadsheets are great for individual users, but in small groups, they’re less great and in large groups, they’re abysmal. On the other hand, cloud solutions were built for collaboration. They allow any authorized participant to work on a plan, from anywhere, at any time. Better still, you’ll always know who made changes and when. Leading cloud vendors have introduced intuitive planning interfaces that make it easy for non-finance personnel to collaborate, enter data, create reports, and run what-if scenarios because they recognize that in business, everybody plans.

Organizations that make the digital transformation leap for planning will see gains in scale and speed. The spreadsheet wasn’t built for enterprise scale, but the cloud was – modern cloud-based planning solutions can support thousands of concurrent users and highly complex multi-dimensional models. Modern solutions are also built to address the performance demands of enterprises. The most advanced cloud planning software solutions use powerful modeling engines that add memory and compute resources when needed and remove the data limits finance pros have come to despise.

Teams can also access data from every corner of the business. Manually importing enterprise data into spreadsheets can be complicated and troublesome — and that’s being polite. In contrast, the best cloud platforms automatically integrate data from your ERP, HCM, CRM and other transactional data sources so that you can refresh data with a single click and know you are working with the latest information.

Mind the gap

There’s a dangerous gap that can emerge when companies rely on outdated processes while their competitors embrace new, more agile ways of working. Agile teams produce market-leading results. The gap yawns even wider for companies still relying on tools developed for the way businesses operated before the internet changed…well, everything.

Holistic company-wide planning isn’t the pipe dream it once was – it’s now a business imperative and it’s the key to unlocking the kind of agility that turns planning into a competitive advantage. Realizing this, more and more execs are coming to the same conclusion: On the journey to the future, spreadsheets for business planning have become as archaic as the Rolodex.

Rob Hull is the founder of Adaptive Insights, a Workday company. Rob had a vision to provide modern finance leaders with an easy-to-use SaaS-based solution to manage business performance. Today that vision is a reality for thousands of businesses around the world.

This post also appeared on the Workday Adaptive Planning blog.

Read additional FP&A Done Right blog posts from our partner Adaptive Insights:

FP&A Done Right: Can you Recover from Static Planning?

FP&A Done Right: How to Improve your Financial Reporting Process

FP&A Done Right: 3 Barriers to Business Agility

Revelwood Offers Adaptive Insights Training Online

April 16, 2020 by Lisa Minneci Leave a Comment

Get the most out of your Adaptive Insights implementation by taking Adaptive Insights training from our award-winning team. Our seasoned, Adaptive-certified instructors ensure you get the technical skills you need to excel with Adaptive Insights.

We offer a range of courses – for the new Adaptive Insights user to experienced Adaptive Insights users looking to take the next step in planning and reporting.

Our current Adaptive Insights training courses are:

Introduction to Adaptive Planning & Reporting

This course introduces new users to Adaptive Planning. You’ll learn Adaptive basics, including:

How to navigate throughout the application
Structure design element basics
How to create an Operating Expense sheet and enter a budget into it
Models & Cubes, Users & Roles, Basic Formulas, Basic Reports, and more

Adaptive Reporting

We’ve designed this course for both new users and intermediate users who want to learn about the reporting features in Adaptive Planning. You’ll learn:

How to use the matrix report builder
How to design a P&L report
How to create a version comparison report
How to use conditional formatting and display options, and more

Introduction to Office Connect

If you have minimal experience with the Office Connect application, then this is the course for you! You’ll learn:

Office Connect terminology and navigation
How to create an Office Connect report that is dynamically linked to Adaptive Planning
How to work with relative and static time-elements, enabling the creating of rolling period reports
How to link selected elements from an Excel report to matching Adaptive Planning data, and more

We offer two different options for these online courses. The first option is a four and a half hour long, fully interactive course. In order to participate in this, your company must have access to the Adaptive Insights eLearning program. The second option is an online, three-hour, view-only course. This course is open to everyone.

Check out our class schedule to find a convenient time for you to hone your Adaptive Insights skills!

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks Video: Formatting Views in Planning Analytics Workspace

April 14, 2020 by Lisa Minneci Leave a Comment

In today’s IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks video, Lee Lazarow, our PF&A Technology Director, demonstrates how to format views in Planning Analytics Workspace (PAW). By using formatting, you will make your views easier to read so your users can spend more time focusing on their data.

Watch the video to learn how to manipulate your views by:

Making your columns wider
Changing rowing heights
Changing fonts and text styles
Adding shading, and more.

You’ll also learn how to start over if you want to change your formatting. Taking the time to format your views makes it much easier for your users to home in on the data and the meaning behind that data.

Want to get our Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks delivered to your inbox every Tuesday? Sign up to get our weekly email of just the week’s tip! And don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more Planning Analytics videos.

Watch more Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks videos:

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks Video: Creating Multi-Level Dimensions

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks Video: The Hold Feature

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks Video: Using Words Instead of Numbers

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Using Words and Numbers Together

Read more IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks:

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: The Data Load Process

Read more IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: