Planning & Reporting

Add Additional Years to your Time Strata

September 10, 2025 by Julia Seelin

Managing time strata effectively is key to long-term financial planning in Workday Adaptive Planning. But what happens when your current calendar doesn’t extend far enough into the future? In this Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks video, we walk through the steps for importing additional years into your Adaptive instance.

Why You May Need to Extend Your Time Strata

Business planning doesn’t stop in the current fiscal year. Many organizations need to plan five, ten, or more years ahead. By adding new years to your Adaptive calendar, you ensure your models, versions, and reports remain aligned with your long-term financial goals.

Steps to extend your time strata

1. Navigate to the time settings
- From the Adaptive home page, go to Modeling and select Time.
- Depending on whether you’re using a legacy or newer instance of Adaptive, you may see different options.
2. Legacy instances: Quick extend option
- Legacy instances allow you to simply select Extend five years forward (or backward).
- This is the most straightforward approach when available.
3. Newer instances: Use the calendar export/import method
- For newer environments where the extend option isn’t available, you’ll need to:
  - Export your current calendar.
  - Open the file in Excel and trim down to a manageable set of years.
  - Replace old years with the future years you want to add (for example, changing 2010 to 2032).
  - Double-check your edits to ensure they align correctly.
4. Re-import the adjusted calendar
- Return to your Adaptive instance and select Import Calendar.
- You’ll see a warning that changes may affect frozen or locked versions—be sure you understand the impact before proceeding.
- For this task, select the Append option (rather than update or reload) and upload your adjusted file.
5. Confirm and finalize
- Once imported, your Adaptive environment will reflect the additional years you’ve added.
- This allows your planning processes to extend seamlessly into the future.

Extending your time strata ensures that Adaptive Planning continues to support your organization’s long-range forecasting. While the process differs slightly between legacy and newer instances, both approaches give you the flexibility to look further ahead and keep your planning future-ready.

Revelwood is more than just a Platinum Workday Adaptive Planning partner — we’re a trusted advisor to the Office of Finance. With 30 years of experience and award-winning expertise, we bring together powerful software, proven best practices and pre-built, ready-to-deploy solutions that accelerate time to value. Our team doesn’t just implement technology — we help finance teams transform the way they plan, analyze and make decisions. Discover how Revelwood can help you get the most out of Workday Adaptive Planning — and achieve results that matter.

Why Strategic Headcount Planning Is the Missing Link in FP&A

September 4, 2025 by Revelwood

In a recent episode of FP&A Done Right – The Podcast, the focus is on strategic headcount planning. This episode delves into the critical role of aligning workforce planning with organizational strategy, emphasizing the importance of integrating financial planning and analysis (FP&A) with human resources to drive business success.

Transforming Headcount Planning into a Strategic Advantage

Strategic headcount planning goes beyond filling roles—it’s about aligning your workforce with your organization’s long-term goals. This episode explores how incorporating workforce planning enables more agile decision-making, improves resource allocation, and ensures your people strategy keeps pace with business demands.

1. The Importance of Strategic Headcount Planning
Effective headcount planning is essential for aligning talent acquisition and management with the company’s strategic objectives. By forecasting workforce needs and understanding the financial implications, organizations can make informed decisions that support growth and adaptability.

2. Leveraging Workday Adaptive Planning
Enterprise planning solutions facilitate real-time collaboration between finance and HR departments. These tools enable dynamic modeling and scenario planning, allowing organizations to respond swiftly to changing business conditions and workforce requirements.

3. Integrating FP&A with HR for Better Outcomes
By integrating FP&A processes with human resources planning, you ensure that financial forecasts account for workforce trends and HR strategies are grounded in financial realities, leading to more cohesive and effective organizational planning.

4. Navigating Challenges in Headcount Planning
The episode addresses common challenges such as data silos, communication gaps between departments, and the complexities of modeling various workforce scenarios. It offers strategies for overcoming these obstacles, emphasizing the need for transparent communication and integrated planning systems.

5. Real-World Applications and Success Stories
We share practical examples of how organizations have successfully implemented strategic headcount planning. These success stories illustrate the tangible benefits of aligning workforce planning with financial strategies, including improved agility and resource optimization.

For finance professionals, HR leaders and organizational strategists, this episode offers valuable insights into the interplay between workforce planning and financial management. It underscores the necessity of integrated planning approaches to navigate the complexities of modern business environments effectively.

Tune in to this episode of FP&A Done Right – The Podcast to explore how strategic headcount planning can serve as a cornerstone for organizational success.

Mastering Merged Cube Sheets in Workday Adaptive Planning

September 3, 2025 by Revelwood

Merged cube sheets are a powerful tool in Workday Adaptive Planning that combine data from up to three modeled or cube sheets. They enable advanced calculations, simplify data management, and enhance forecasting. Let’s dive deeper into understanding their purpose, characteristics, and how to build them.

Why Use Merged Cube Sheets?

Merged cube sheets are especially useful for:

Creating calculated accounts without requiring data presence in the sheet itself. This feature ensures that formulas calculate accurately, even when data is absent in the merged cube’s standard accounts. Usually, a lack of data in the cube’s standard accounts forces formulas to evaluate at zero. Merged cube sheets bypass this rule by using the data presence of the source sheets.
Building simpler source sheets that focus only on necessary dimensions, then merging them to manage complex data across multiple dimensions efficiently.

Additional benefits include:

Allocations across dimensions using formulas.
Serving as calculation identifiers for other cube sheets.
Chaining merged cubes, where one merged cube acts as a source for another.

*Disclaimer: Using merged cube sheets in these additional ways can increase complexity of your model and may cause unexpected behaviors.

Example of a Merged Cube Sheet

Suppose you need to calculate revenue based on quantity and price across dimensions like customer, region, and product. Instead of managing this in one massive sheet:

1. Create a modeled sheet with the Customer dimension for forecasting total product purchases without breaking it down by product.
2. Create a cube sheet with the Product dimension for forecasting prices and mix by product.
3. Build a merged revenue sheet that combines these two sources to calculate total revenue by multiplying quantities and prices for each customer and product.

Characteristics of Merged Cube Sheets

Merged cube sheets:

Are read-only with no data entry support.
Require at least one calculated account. Data entry overrides are not available for this account.
Only allow account groups, calculated accounts, and metric accounts.
Can merge up to three source sheets (modeled or cube).
Contain only dimensions already present in the source sheets.
Must include any common dimensions across all source sheets.
- Ex: if both sheets contain the product dimension, the merged cube must also include the product dimension.
Cannot include cube restrictions.
Only calculate intersections where data exists in the source sheets.

Steps to Build Cube and Merged Cube Sheets

1. Create Dimensions, Attributes, and Levels you want to add to the sheet.
- Follow standard procedures for adding these elements to your planning model.
2. Create Source Sheets for Merged Cube Sheets.
- Source sheets can be either modeled or cube sheets.
3. Start a New Sheet.
- Select cube sheet and check the box for a merged cube.
4. (For Merged Sheets) Select Source Sheets.
- Identify the sheets you wish to merge. This is located in the settings under “Dimensions, Attributes and Levels.”
5. (Optional) Create Account Groups.
- Organize accounts for easier navigation.
6. Create Cube Accounts.
7. Add general ledger and custom accounts to your sheet and ensure they are cube-entered in account settings.
- You can add general ledger and custom accounts to the cube sheet after you make the accounts cube-entered. In the account settings, for Data Entry Sheet Type, click Cube.
8. Add Dimensions and Attributes.
- Include necessary custom dimensions and attributes in your sheet.
9. Select Time Periods.
- By default, all available time periods are included.
10. Add Levels, Accounts, Dimensions, and Attributes.
- Optionally hide certain cube accounts to simplify the sheet view.
11. (Optional) Adjust Sheet Properties.
- Set the initial view, remove the cube root account, set the time strata, and manage calculation scope as well as other settings to enhance usability.
12. Assign the Sheet to Users.
- If the sheet requires user assignment, ensure permissions are correctly set.
13. Load Data into the Sheet.
- Data can be imported via spreadsheets, integration loaders, or entered directly from the Sheets menu.
14. Monitor Usage and Performance.
- Regularly review the sheet’s performance to ensure optimal functionality.

Merged cube sheets are a great feature for streamlining complex forecasting models. By combining data from simpler sheets, they improve calculation efficiency and enhance data visibility. Following these steps will help you create effective merged cube sheets tailored to your organization’s planning needs.

Account Modifiers in Formulas

August 27, 2025 by Julia Seelin

The Formula Assistant in Workday Adaptive Planning provides a provides a powerful way to customize how data is pulled and calculated in formulas

To enhance the flexibility of your formulas, you can use a variety of modifiers that adjust how the information is retrieved. These modifiers include time, level, dimension, and attributes, each serving a unique purpose to make your formulas more dynamic and accurate. By incorporating these modifiers, you can manipulate the data in various ways to meet specific reporting or analysis needs.

For instance, when referencing an account, you can apply these modifiers to retrieve data in a manner that fits your desired outcome. A common example would be when you want to reference trailing data, such as pulling the trailing 12 months of revenue. By modifying the formula to say

ACCT.Revenue[time=this-12:this-1],

you can ensure that it pulls revenue data for the previous 12 months, with the ending month being the one immediately preceding the current month you’re analyzing.

Beyond time-based adjustments, you can also use account attributes to fine-tune your calculations based on groupings or classifications associated with the data. For example, if you want to calculate revenue specifically for a particular region, you can apply an attribute filter like

ACCT.Revenue[Region = North]

to pull in all revenue data associated with accounts tagged with the “North” region. This allows you to create more granular and targeted reports, tailored to specific attributes or dimensions within your data.

These modifiers help ensure that your formulas are more flexible, powerful, and specific to your needs, providing deeper insights and more accurate reporting.

Workday Adaptive Planning Earns “Customers’ Choice” Recognition in Gartner’s Voice of the Customer Report

August 22, 2025 by Revelwood

For the third year in a row, Workday Adaptive Planning has been named a Customers’ Choice in Gartner’s latest Voice of the Customer for Financial Planning Software report — earning an impressive 96% recommendation rate from users.

Gartner Peer Insights aggregates and validates verified user reviews, then awards the Customers’ Choice badge to vendors who exceed market averages across metrics such as:

Product capabilities
Ease of deployment
Support experience
Sales experience

Workday Adaptive Planning consistently ranks among the top performers in every category — underscoring its strong product design, reliable support, and seamless implementation.

Workday Adaptive Planning’s Results

This Gartner report includes some impressive ratings for Workday Adaptive Planning:

96% of users say they would recommend Workday Adaptive Planning
It holds an overall rating of 4.8/5 on Gartner Peer Insights
It earns 4.8 in key areas like Product Capabilities, Sales, and Support Experience and a 4.7 in Deployment Experience

The benchmarking reveals that Workday outpaces other financial planning platforms — like Anaplan, OneStream, Pigment and Oracle — in user satisfaction and recommendation rates

Why Organizations Love Workday Adaptive Planning

Organizations throughout the world love Workday Adaptive Planning as a result of its:

1. Scalability & Flexibility
2. AI-Driven Insight
3. Transformational ROI

Revelwood + Adaptive Planning = Powering FP&A Excellence

As a trusted partner, Revelwood empowers finance teams to leverage Workday Adaptive Planning to:

Accelerate deployment with best-practice templates
Train and onboard teams for fast adoption
Continuously optimize investment and health of the platform

Our experts ensure every customer captures maximum value — driving both process efficiency and strategic insight.

Workday Adaptive Planning’s recognition as a Gartner Customers’ Choice — backed by exceptional real-world reviews and top-tier ratings — reinforces why thousands of organizations trust it to manage complex planning, modeling and forecasting workflows.

Read the report today!

Optimizing FP&A in Multi-Site Healthcare Organizations

August 8, 2025 by Revelwood

Managing a multisite healthcare organization – such as a group of eye doctors or urgent care centers – is a complex endeavor. These healthcare organizations have multiple locations with diverse revenue streams. it’s critical to have a robust system for budgeting, forecasting, and reporting.

Increasingly, these healthcare organizations are turning to Workday Adaptive Planning for their centralized FP&A activities.

Key Benefits for Multisite Healthcare Organizations

Workday Adaptive Planning is designed to empower healthcare organizations with tools that simplify and enhance financial planning and analysis. Here’s how:

1. Streamlined Budgeting and Forecasting: Multisite organizations often spend countless hours building budgets for each location. Workday Adaptive Planning reduces this time significantly by providing a centralized platform where budgets and forecasts can be created, updated, and managed with ease.
2. Sophisticated Reporting Capabilities: Complex reporting is essential in healthcare for analyzing performance and making strategic decisions. Workday Adaptive Planning enables detailed reporting on critical metrics such as:
- Reimbursement rates
- Non-billable hours
- Daily sales outstanding (DSO)
- Specialty-specific revenue and expenses

This granularity ensures leaders have the insights needed to optimize operations across all locations.

3. Enhanced Visibility into Financial Processes: The platform offers a more transparent and detailed view of the budgeting process. This enhanced visibility enables proactive adjustments, ensuring that budgets align with organizational goals.
4. Census Information Management: Healthcare organizations rely on accurate census data for resource allocation and planning. Workday Adaptive Planning facilitates tracking and charting census information to support data-driven decisions.

Comprehensive Tools in One Centralized Platform

Workday Adaptive Planning consolidates essential tools into a single, user-friendly interface. Key functionalities include:

Volume-Based Modeling: Optimize resources and services by projecting patient volumes and aligning them with operational capacity.
Capacity and Workflow Planning: Streamline staffing and resource allocation to improve efficiency and patient outcomes.
Forecasting and Budgeting: Create short-term and long-term financial plans tailored to each site’s unique needs.
Revenue Recognition: Customize revenue reporting to reflect specialty-specific practices and ensure compliance with accounting standards.
Practice and Location-Level Reporting: Gain granular insights into individual practices or sites to identify areas of improvement and replicate success.

Adopting Workday Adaptive Planning equips multisite healthcare organizations with the agility and precision needed to navigate a rapidly evolving industry. Its intuitive design ensures ease of use for financial teams, while its robust features empower organizations to focus on what matters most—delivering exceptional patient care.

By investing in a system that integrates budgeting, forecasting, and reporting, healthcare organizations can drive operational efficiency, reduce costs, and improve decision-making at every level.

Why Scenario Planning is a Must-Have Skill for Today’s FP&A Teams

August 7, 2025 by Revelwood

In today’s fast-changing business environment, agility is everything—and that’s where scenario planning becomes indispensable. In a recent episode of FP&A Done Right – The Podcast, titled Scenario Planning: Critical for Today’s FP&A Professionals, we unpack why this strategic tool is no longer optional for finance teams looking to stay ahead.

From Forecasting to Future-Proofing

Traditional forecasting often relies on a single set of assumptions, which can leave organizations vulnerable when the unexpected happens. Scenario planning, by contrast, allows FP&A professionals to explore multiple “what if” scenarios—ranging from best-case to worst-case—and understand the impact of various drivers on business performance. This proactive mindset transforms finance from reactive scorekeepers to strategic advisors.

Embedding Scenario Planning into the FP&A Process

The episode offers practical advice on how to build scenario planning into everyday FP&A workflows. It’s not just about having the right tools—it’s about having the right mindset and processes in place. The hosts emphasize that companies that make scenario planning a core part of their planning cadence are better equipped to respond to disruption, adjust course quickly, and make more confident decisions.

Real-World Lessons and Examples

Listeners will hear how companies are using scenario planning to navigate challenges like inflation, supply chain volatility, and changing customer behavior. By testing different assumptions and modeling potential outcomes, finance teams can guide their organizations through uncertainty with greater clarity and confidence.

Bottom Line? Be Prepared.

Scenario planning is more than a buzzword—it’s a critical capability for modern FP&A teams. If your finance organization isn’t already prioritizing it, this episode might just change your mind.

Listen to the full episode

Understanding Drill Down in Web Reporting

August 6, 2025 by Sarah Hildenbrand

Drill down reporting is a powerful feature in Workday Adaptive Planning Web Reporting. It allows businesses to dive deeper into data for more precise insights. Here’s a quick guide to understanding its benefits and how to use it effectively.

Why Drill Down Reporting is Crucial

Uncover Hidden Insights: Identify trends or issues not visible at a high level (Can see variances or changes at children levels, accounts, dimensions and attributes).
Better Decision-Making: Understand why performance changes, helping refine strategies.
Targeted Reporting: Focus on specific metrics relevant to your department or team (marketing, sales, product, expenses, personnel).

How to Use Drill Down in Web Reporting

1. Go to Web Reporting and click on the “Edit” button on the report you are working on.

2. Select the “Report Properties” gear on the back end of the report.

3. Choose which Adaptive elements you want available for the drill down and click “Apply” (levels, accounts, attributes, dimensions). This also helps clean up the drill down options.

4. Save and run the report and go to the front end and click the component you want to drill.

A screenshot of a calendar

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

5. See the drill down and continue to drill into elements depending on the detail you want.

6. Once you are at the level of drill detail you want, click the “i” to see what your drill down consists of for the intersection of data. Make sure to click the “arrow” after you are done to return to the undrilled down report. DO NOT SAVE AT ANY DRILL DOWN VIEW! This will cause the report structure to change to the saved view.

A screenshot of a computer

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Workday Adaptive Planning for Managing Cash Flow

July 25, 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 construction company that prides itself on building homes that “just feel right.” They build quality-made homes across Easter Pennsylvania, in Berks County, Chester County, Lancaster County, Lebanon County and more.

Problem: Managing Cash Flow

Scenario: Cash flow is one of the biggest challenges facing home builders. A home building company will get a down payment from a client, after which the construction company relies on bank loans per project to cover the labor and material costs until the home is finished and turned over to the new homeowner. It sounds simple – except when faced with variable costs for labor and goods, delays for materials and a multitude of new projects at various levels of completion. This company needed insight into how the increasing costs and delays impact any one project. They also wanted to understand how the sum of the current projects relate to cash flow and the company’s ability to sign contracts with new clients.

How We Helped: Revelwood integrated Workday Adaptive Planning with MarkSystems Home Builder Software. Revelwood built a cash flow model that incorporates detailed loan information. The cash flow modeling, analysis and reporting solution relies on data sets for “draws.” A draw schedule is a detailed payment plan that determines when a bank will disburse funds to the home building company. The company how has a sophisticated and comprehensive view of cash flow based on projects, payments and milestones.

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

Read the posts in our series, How We Solve Problems Using Workday Adaptive Planning

How We Solve Problems: Improving the Performance of Workday Adaptive Planning

How We Solve Problems Using Workday Adaptive Planning

Using Workday Adaptive Planning for Headcount Planning

Add Additional Years to your Time Strata

Why You May Need to Extend Your Time Strata

Steps to extend your time strata

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Why Strategic Headcount Planning Is the Missing Link in FP&A

Transforming Headcount Planning into a Strategic Advantage

Mastering Merged Cube Sheets in Workday Adaptive Planning

Why Use Merged Cube Sheets?

Example of a Merged Cube Sheet

Characteristics of Merged Cube Sheets

Steps to Build Cube and Merged Cube Sheets

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Account Modifiers in Formulas

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Workday Adaptive Planning Earns “Customers’ Choice” Recognition in Gartner’s Voice of the Customer Report

Workday Adaptive Planning’s Results

Why Organizations Love Workday Adaptive Planning

Revelwood + Adaptive Planning = Powering FP&A Excellence

Read the report today!

Read more from this series:

Optimizing FP&A in Multi-Site Healthcare Organizations

Key Benefits for Multisite Healthcare Organizations

Comprehensive Tools in One Centralized Platform

Read more from this series:

Why Scenario Planning is a Must-Have Skill for Today’s FP&A Teams

From Forecasting to Future-Proofing

Embedding Scenario Planning into the FP&A Process

Real-World Lessons and Examples

Bottom Line? Be Prepared.

Understanding Drill Down in Web Reporting

Why Drill Down Reporting is Crucial

How to Use Drill Down in Web Reporting

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Workday Adaptive Planning for Managing Cash Flow

Read the posts in our series, How We Solve Problems Using Workday Adaptive Planning

Revelwood Overview

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Planning & Reporting

Why You May Need to Extend Your Time Strata

Steps to extend your time strata

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Transforming Headcount Planning into a Strategic Advantage

Why Use Merged Cube Sheets?

Example of a Merged Cube Sheet

Characteristics of Merged Cube Sheets

Steps to Build Cube and Merged Cube Sheets

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Workday Adaptive Planning’s Results

Why Organizations Love Workday Adaptive Planning

Revelwood + Adaptive Planning = Powering FP&A Excellence

Read more from this series:

Key Benefits for Multisite Healthcare Organizations

Comprehensive Tools in One Centralized Platform

Read more from this series:

From Forecasting to Future-Proofing

Embedding Scenario Planning into the FP&A Process

Real-World Lessons and Examples

Bottom Line? Be Prepared.

Why Drill Down Reporting is Crucial

How to Use Drill Down in Web Reporting

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Read the posts in our series, How We Solve Problems Using Workday Adaptive Planning

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