Financial Performance Management

Workday Adaptive Planning for Budgeting and Forecasting for a SaaS Business Model

January 8, 2025 by Revelwood

This post continues our series on how we use Workday Adaptive Planning to solve problems. Each blog post focuses on a real-world client experience where Revelwood was presented with a unique or thorny problem. We’ll explain our approach to how we solved it.

Revelwood Client: A SaaS company that is a next-generation online data provider for insurers.

Problem: Budgeting and Forecasting for a SaaS Business Model

Scenario: This fast-growing software-as-a-service needed a sophisticated approach to budgeting, planning, forecasting and reporting. The company is a very low-asset organization with minimal CapEx requirements. As a result, they are very focused on their P&L. They needed a model that reflects annual recurring revenue and enables them to manage multi-year planning several years out.

How We Helped: We built a revenue model that incorporates annual recurring revenue. It enables the company to drill down into P&L data. This model gives the company insights into future revenue as well as historical revenue. They are able to take all of their P&L data and provide reporting on it to senior management and to the company’s investors.

Do you have a challenge you’d like to leverage Workday Adaptive Planning for? Reach out to us – we can help!

Meet Emery Sinclair, Revelwood’s Vice President of Client Success

December 19, 2024 by Revelwood

Emery Sinclair recently rejoined Revelwood as our new vice president of client success. Previously, he spent eight years serving as Revelwood’s director of solutions and strategy. We sat down with Emery to learn his vision for this new role and why he returned to Revelwood.

Q: Welcome back! Tell us about your new role.

Emery: Thanks. I’m responsible for overseeing and expanding our Client Success team. Our goals are to optimize the client experience by expanding our service offerings and driving product adoption. We want to make sure our clients get the full benefits they expect from their investments in technology for the Office of Finance.

Currently our clients receive complimentary training, free system performance tune-ups, access to open Q&A sessions and exclusive content. We plan on expanding our offerings. At Revelwood we say – and we mean it – that we have our clients’ backs. Our Client Success team will put even more processes and thought around how we do that.

Q: What have you been doing in between your time with us?

Emery: I’ve focused on client success. I’ve had the opportunity to work with startups that were headquartered outside of the U.S. This has given me an interesting perspective on how to work with organizations of all sizes to partner for success. Success not just in selling software, but in actually working toward long-term relationships with our clients. As one Revelwoodian recently said, “We don’t just deliver [an implementation] and run away. In fact, we do the opposite of that.

Q: Why did you decide to return to Revelwood?

Emery: Revelwood has nearly quadrupled in size since I left in 2014. There’s a significant amount of growth in the financial planning software market and related technologies for the Office of Finance. Revelwood has the right people and the right experience to capitalize on this fast-growing market.

Revelwood also has a client base of raving fans. That’s a great starting point for my goals for the Client Success team. We’re not just a service provider, we are a vested advocate that helps them achieve their goals for transforming the Office of Finance.

And, they are great people!

Learn more about Emery – read the press release and connect with him on LinkedIn.

Meet Dino Daddona, Revelwood’s New Vice President of Sales, Americas

December 18, 2024 by Revelwood

Dino Daddona was recently named Revelwood’s vice president of sales, Americas. We sat down with him to learn more about his thoughts on Revelwood.

Q: Why did you choose to join Revelwood?

Dino: The majority of my career has been in roles selling to the Office of Finance. So it was functionally a good fit. More importantly, though, Revelwood is in a unique position in the market. The company is on a rapid growth trajectory and has a legacy of success helping clients transform financial performance and operations. That makes Revelwood a rare find.

Many Revelwoodians have been with the company for many years. That is a sign of a great company. It is a testament to the quality of the leadership, the commitment to individuals’ success and its commitment to the company’s Core Values.

Q: What do you see as Revelwood’s opportunity in the market?

Dino: There is a massive opportunity to help companies transform their Office of Finance. According to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Financial Planning Software, “Organizations are increasingly seeking efficient, agile planning and management to respond to market changes.” Frankly, nearly every organization now faces “market changes” on a regular basis. This means that companies – and they are many of them – that still use spreadsheets for budgeting and planning need to modernize their finance operations now.

Workday Adaptive Planning is one of the best financial planning solutions on the market. Revelwood is the leading Workday Adaptive Planning partner in the Americas. Additionally, Revelwood has decades of experience (and awards to prove it!) partnering with IBM. We’ve also received awards from our partner BlackLine.

We are perfectly positioned for exponential growth in the market.

Q: What will you be doing in this new role?

Dino: I’m Revelwood’s first vice president of sales, Americas. I oversee our Sales and Pre-sales teams. These teams are a mix of Revelwood veterans and new team members, some of whom are just entering the workplace. Having a diverse team means that we can leverage both experience and new ideas.

My role also includes strengthening relationships with our partners. Our partnerships are not just traditional technology “Barney hugs.” We invest in training and certifications from our partners. We’re not generalists – we are experts in technology for the Office of Finance. It’s important that our partners understand how committed we are to mutual success.Learn more about Dino.

Read the press release and check him out on LinkedIn.

10 Steps to Transform Financial Planning & Analysis: A Guide to a Successful FP&A Implementation

December 13, 2024 by Revelwood

The role of Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) has never been more crucial. Organizations are increasingly relying on FP&A solutions to streamline data, enhance decision-making and drive business strategy. Yet, despite the potential, many FP&A implementations fail to meet expectations.

Why FP&A Matters

FP&A systems are more than just software—they are a transformative tool for financial leaders. By centralizing data and enabling real-time analysis, FP&A allows organizations to:

Eliminate spreadsheet chaos and data silos.
Focus on strategic decision-making.
Align business goals with measurable financial outcomes.

But the path to success requires more than technology. It demands a strategic, phased approach that considers people, processes, and culture.

Read Top 10 Steps for a Successful FP&A Implementation to learn why the best implementations include:

Securing Strong Leadership: Every successful FP&A implementation begins with an engaged and empowered executive sponsor. Their support can steer the project and drive cultural alignment.
Defining Clear Requirements: A detailed understanding of your organization’s needs is critical. Without clarity, even the best technology will fall short.
Phased Implementation: Breaking the project into manageable phases ensures quick wins, sustained momentum, and reduced risks.
Emphasizing Ownership: Knowledge transfer is key. Ensure your team is equipped to take full ownership of the system post-implementation.
Communicating Effectively: Transparent communication keeps all stakeholders informed, builds trust, and minimizes resistance to change.
Partnering with IT: While FP&A is often led by finance, IT plays a vital role in data integration, infrastructure support, and ensuring scalability.
Investments in Training: The success of any system depends on its users. Tailored training programs ensure every team member—from power users to casual users—is ready to leverage the system.
Staffing Wisely: The right team can make or break your implementation. Carefully choose project managers, solution owners, and functional leads.
Closing the Loop: Measure your results against initial goals. Document lessons learned and use them to inform future projects.
Choosing the Right Partner: An experienced implementation partner can make all the difference. Look for expertise in your chosen software and a track record of delivering value.

Ready to Get Started?

Download the full whitepaper, Top 10 Steps for a Successful FP&A Implementation, to unlock the strategies for success.

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: High Availability in Version 12

November 19, 2024 by Revelwood

IBM’s Planning Analytics version 12 introduces a new feature known as high availability. It enables you to manage multiple database replicas in parallel, thereby enhancing both performance and reliability.

Revelwood’s IBM Planning Analytics Practice Director Lee Lazarow explains high availability in one of our IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks videos.

How High Availability Works

Load balancing and fault tolerance is at the core of high availability. When a user submits a request—be it updating a data point, executing a TurboIntegrator script, or conducting some other processing—the request is directed to one of the database replicas, known as the leader replica.

1. Role of the Leader Replica:
- The leader executes all required changes, performs calculations, and manages processing tasks.
- Once the leader completes these tasks successfully, it shares/sends the changes to all other replicas, ensuring that they are kept in sync.
2. Load Distribution:
- By distributing user requests across multiple replicas, the system mitigates the risk of a single heavy processing task impacting overall performance. This load spreading enhances the user experience, particularly in environments with fluctuating demands.
3. Active Management of Replicas:
- The engine takes an active role in monitoring and managing the health of each replica. If the leader becomes unavailable for any reason, another instance is automatically promoted to take over its responsibilities, ensuring continuity of service.
4. Dynamic Scaling:
- One of the standout features of high availability is the ability to dynamically adjust the number of replicas based on current demands—all without requiring downtime. This flexibility is particularly useful for organizations with varying usage patterns:
  - During peak periods (e.g., month-end closings, budgeting cycles), you can scale up the number of replicas to accommodate increased user activity.
  - Conversely, during quieter periods, you can scale down, optimizing resource usage and costs.

Managing High Availability

Managing high availability in Planning Analytics is straightforward and user-friendly. Here’s a brief overview of how to configure and monitor this feature:

1. Accessing the Management Interface:
- Within the administration interface, you can easily enable or disable high availability by selecting the relevant checkbox.
2. Configuring Replicas:
- You can define the number of replicas you wish to create. As you increase the number of replicas, the system automatically adjusts memory usage based on your configuration. For instance:
  - If the original database requires 4 GB of memory, adding a replica would require an additional 4 GB.
3. Real-time Monitoring:
- The system provides real-time feedback on memory usage and warns you if you attempt to allocate more replicas than your available resources can support. This proactive management ensures that you maintain optimal performance without overloading the system.

IBM Planning Analytics version 12’s high availability feature is an advancement in how organizations can manage their Planning Analytics environments. Users achieve greater efficiency, reliability and scalability by leveraging multiple replicas.

Revelwood is an IBM Gold Business Partner with 25+ years of experience designing, developing, implementing and maintaining IBM Planning Analytics environments. Revelwood has helped clients in all sizes across all industries optimize and grow their use of Planning Analytics. Revelwood’s Planning Analytics team consists of experienced PA experts, including a multi-year IBM Champion.

Stay up to date with PA – sign up for our weekly Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks newsletter, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and join our IBM Planning Analytics All-Stars group on LinkedIn.

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: ASCIIOUTPUT

November 5, 2024 by Revelwood

One of our recent IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks videos and blog posts focused on IBM Planning Analytics file manager, and how it can be used to export files. With IBM Planning Analytics, version 12, you can use that approach. But you can also still use ASCII output to create files.

The change with version 12 is that the output path is going to be a little different. Watch Lee Lazarow, Revelwood’s IBM Planning Analytics practice leader, explain how to use ASCII output in version 12.

Lee shows you how to:

Modify a TurboIntegrator script for specific paths
Create new folders with ASCII output

You’ll also learn the pros and cons of automatic folder creation.

Stay up to date with PA – sign up for our weekly Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks newsletter, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and join our IBM Planning Analytics All-Stars group on LinkedIn.

FP&A Maturity Assessment: Where Do You Rank?

October 18, 2024 by Revelwood

There are tangible, concrete benefits to having a mature FP&A process. These include improved decision-making, increased efficiency, agility and responsiveness, enhanced forecasting accuracy and more.

How do you know if your processes are mature? Here are some key indicators:

Data integration and accuracy. You have reliable data sources integrated with your planning environment for real-time analysis.
Forecasting and predictive analytics. You use advanced forecasting techniques, scenario modeling and predictive analytics.
Cross-department collaboration. Your FP&A team works closely with other departments.
Agility and adaptability. You have the ability to rapidly adjust forecasts and strategies in response to changing conditions.
Technology-driven automation. You leverage automation tools to streamline reporting, budgeting and forecasting.

Would you like to learn how advanced your organization is at financial planning? Take this short (two minutes!), FP&A Maturity Assessment from Forrester Research. You’ll get customized results and recommendations for your organization.

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: How We Solve Problems

May 14, 2024 by Revelwood

This post is the first post in our new blog series: How We Solve Problems. Each blog post focuses on a real-world client experience where Revelwood was presented with a unique or thorny problem. We’ll explain our approach to how we solved it.

Revelwood Client: A publicly traded television broadcasting company that owns and operates more than 175 stations across the United States.

Planning Environment: IBM Planning Analytics

Problem: The company’s budgeting process was very granular and plans down to the individual employee. The calculations in the model include detailed benefits and taxes, combined with multiple bonus calculations that depend on results from the core financial model. Due to the size and complexity of the process, “top of the house” reports took more than 10 minutes to properly refresh.

How We Helped: Revelwood analyzed the existing calculations and the interaction of the various models to determine an efficient order of processing. Due to the need for an order of operations, many of the live rules were converted into on-demand TurboIntegrator scripts. This approach shrunk an individual company’s refresh time from one minute down to a few seconds while also bringing the “top of the house” analysis down to under 20 seconds.

Do you have a challenge with your Planning Analytics environment? Let us tackle the problem!

Send us a quick email!

Solving Financial Reporting Challenges

May 3, 2024 by Revelwood

This is a blog post from our partner Workday, highlighting common financial reporting challenges and explaining how to solve them.

Stakeholders want self-service: Reporting runs the gamut, from presenting department managers with data on how their actuals compare to budget, to showing board members how expansions or changes in the product mix are impacting margins.

Why it matters: Businesses largely run on accurate, timely financial reports, as they are home to critical financial and operational key performance indicators.

Most organizations know that their financial reporting is not as good as it should be. The reasons are many—chief among them is the perception that process improvements are too difficult and take too much time to implement.

But when you put better reporting on the back burner, you put your business at risk. Instead of looking in the rear-view mirror—a static approach to planning that reports on what happened in the past—it’s far more effective for finance teams to look out the windshield and anticipate what’s ahead.

Let’s take a look at four common financial reporting challenges and how to tackle them:

Challenge 1: Verifying Accuracy

Excel is a great tool. But the static nature of spreadsheets makes it difficult to quickly and consistently produce up-to-date financial reports, which compromises speed and accuracy. Spreadsheets can also create version-control issues when they’re routed for review or verification, hindering efficiency and security.

Even with single-user spreadsheets, lack of a centralized reporting system introduces more inconsistencies in metrics, data, and calculations, forcing finance teams to spend valuable time verifying and validating data. In this situation, it’s especially difficult to conduct variance and comparative reporting—a step that can reveal necessary course corrections. CFOs who automate data gathering can instill a greater level of trust in the data while making it easier to reveal valuable insights.

Excel is a great tool. But the static nature of spreadsheets makes it difficult to quickly and consistently produce up-to-date financial reports, which compromises speed and accuracy.

Challenge 2: Wrestling Data from Multiple Systems

As a finance professional, you’re responsible for generating clear and actionable financial data. Your company’s decision-makers must be able to understand not only the analysis behind the data, but also the actions to consider as a result of that analysis.

But one missing piece of data can prevent stakeholders from getting the insights they need. And with more organizations tracking nonfinancial metrics, corporate reports are including increasing amounts of operational data. Using traditional reporting methods to access and incorporate such information—usually housed outside of finance—creates an additional burden.

Challenge 3: Lack of Collaboration

Financial reporting should be a collaborative process, with finance and nonfinance managers working together to not only report the numbers, but to also use them to drive insights and take action. But all too often, operating managers don’t have sufficient input or buy-in to the financial planning process, and they aren’t educated about how their decisions can influence overall profitability. For its part, finance isn’t able to offer real performance insights that might truly help managers improve their results because legacy reporting tools don’t enable stakeholder collaboration.

Challenge 4: Data Interpretation

You’ve gathered the data—now you need to analyze and interpret it so you can clearly articulate financial and operational insights. The more the organization understands the story behind the numbers, the greater the chance it has to be data-driven—and the more effective you can be in getting your message across to key stakeholders.

That’s because those outside of finance tend to consume data visually. They seek more than just numbers; they want to understand the impact and implications of the data you present. For those wanting to make good on good intentions, intuitive dashboards and data visualization are a great way to build a story that clearly shows current performance, future trends, and possible scenarios. Ideally, you should choose a dashboard offering that gives finance staff the flexibility to quickly and easily deliver data in a range of formats desired by stakeholders.

What’s the Answer?

To overcome these traditional reporting challenges, you need to go beyond yesterday’s inadequate access to information and limited financial reporting. You need a system that is more sophisticated than a spreadsheet, but not so overly engineered that it takes six months to deploy and requires significant IT involvement.

The solution you choose should deliver financial intelligence that drives improved business performance and accelerates growth. And it should enable an active planning approach to finance—a process that allows finance to shift into a leadership and guiding role, instead of having to focus on static, transactional back-office tasks.

This blog post was originally published on the Workday blog.

More from our FP&A Done Right Series:

The Promise of AI in Finance

The Role of Generative AI in Forecasting

The Future of FP&A: Intelligent Forecasting