• Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer
Revelwood Logo

Revelwood

Your SUPER-powered WP Engine Site

  • Who We Are
    • About Us
      • Our Company
      • Our Team
      • Partners
    • Careers
      • Join Our Team
  • What We Do
    • Solutions
      • Workday Adaptive Planning
      • IBM Planning Analytics
      • BlackLine
    • Services
      • Implementation Services
      • Customer Care
        • Help Desk
        • System Administration as a Service
      • Training
        • Workday Adaptive Planning Training
        • IBM Planning Analytics / TM1 Training
    • Products
      • DataMaestro
      • LightSpeed
      • IBM Planning Analytics Utilities
  • How We Help
    • Use Cases
    • Client Success Stories
  • How We Think
    • Knowledge Center
    • Events
    • News
  • Contact Us

Planning & Reporting

FP&A Done Right: Forecasting Revenue for Services-Based Businesses: A Growth Factor

August 19, 2022 by Revelwood

More than half of professional services firms can’t forecast project revenue beyond six months. Workday’s Mark David and Justin Joseph share insights into how organizations can get revenue forecasting right, even when business is anything but usual.

What is it about revenue forecasting that can be so challenging? For people-based industries such as professional services, their project revenue is based on talent supply. And people—including all 109 billion of them who have ever lived on Earth—can be difficult to predict. 

“People are highly variable,” said Justin Joseph, senior director of product strategy at Workday. “They aren’t always available. They go on vacation. And, as we’ve experienced the past few years, people leave, and there can be skills shortages. So there’s a lot of variability in how professional services companies generate project revenue.”

Beyond the variability of their employees and the impact of unprecedented trends and events, professional services firms also deal with different systems in different parts of the organization. These silos can cause data to be inconsistent and inaccurate—challenges that only get worse as an organization grows.

“The larger an organization, the more complex things get,” said Mark David, vice president of solution management at Workday. “Organizations then become more reliant on processes to manage projects and people, but that requires accurate data from disparate places.”

In this episode of the Workday Podcast, we’re 100% focused on revenue forecasting for professional services, with guests Joseph and David. They share trends impacting firms, the pros and cons of different types of forecasting, and how firms can start to solve their challenges to better plan and forecast.  

Here are a few highlights of our conversation, edited for clarity. Be sure to follow us wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts, and remember you can find our entire podcast catalog here.  

  • “The reason most companies can’t forecast their revenue more accurately is because they have different systems and data across their lines of businesses and services. And all those different systems mean that you have data that’s going to be wildly inconsistent. You’ll need a lot of integrations to pull this data together to make sure that you have an end-to-end process for revenue forecasting.” —Justin Joseph
  • “A year ago, a customer who runs a 5,000-employee professional services firm told me the one thing he needed was a good revenue forecast more than anything else right now. As you can imagine, this was especially needed with what’s happened over the last few years, which have made forecasting where your business is going even more difficult.” —Mark David
  • “With unexpected scenarios, you’re following the exact same processes as expected scenarios, but you have to forecast at a much faster pace and much more frequently because your assumptions are changing so rapidly, maybe hour by hour or day by day. How quickly can you pull this data together and then model it and share it out? It may sound contradictory, but they’re similar. Speed is ultimately what’s different.” —Justin Joseph

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

Read more FP&A Done Right posts:

FP&A Done Right: The Changing Role of the CFO

FP&A Done Right: Financial Forecasting Processes that Guide Business Strategy

FP&A Done Right: Continuous Planning Leads to Agile Businesses

Home » Planning & Reporting » Page 4

Filed Under: FP&A Done Right Tagged With: Budgeting Planning & Forecasting, Financial Performance Management, Planning & Reporting, Workday, Workday Adaptive Planning

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Revenue Cohort Modeling

June 8, 2022 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

Tips & Tricks

Do you know about cohort modeling in Workday Adaptive Planning?

A cohort model provides meaningful insight of data grouped into subsets based on any characteristic important to the company. The groups are called “cohorts.” Cohorts can be based on time (i.e. season, monthly, yearly), segment (i.e. commercial, residential), or size (i.e. low, medium, high), just to name a few. Cohorts follow a pattern of behavior that helps analysts project future trends. This can help companies focus efforts on lowering churn and optimizing revenue.

Cohort model vs. Regular model

Compared to a regular model, a cohort model provides a more granular view of the data. Projecting revenue at the cohort level helps companies understand outliers that would otherwise be missed in a regular revenue model.

For example, in a regular model, projected revenue shows overall revenue for the year and may show growth. However, if you dig further into the segments, you will see that one cohort, such as small businesses in the manufacturing industry, had a large decline in sales.

If this information was available early in the year, further decline could have been prevented and management could have strategized to avoid a blow to the bottom line in the following year. Maintaining and analyzing multiple cohort models on a regular basis is crucial for successful strategic planning.

Where to use cohort modeling

  • Subscription base revenue – tech, gaming, food, streaming, service, etc.
  • Contract billing – by milestone, period, ASC 606 amortization, etc
  • Seasonality base revenue
  • Freemium – lead conversion
  • Sales Rep capacity or conversion

How to build cohort models in Workday Adaptive Planning

Cohort model in Adaptive may comprise of multiple sheets. Below is an example of a cohort model structure.

  1. 1. Planned # of Customers/Cohort
  • Modeled sheet
  • Create number data entry column to input number of customers
  • Create calculated account and link the data entry column
  • Input by cohort dimension – this can be by month/period, type of cohort, etc (ex. Jan, Feb, Mar – the month new customers are acquired)
  • No timespan

Table

Description automatically generated

  1. 2. Cohort Drivers/Curves 
  • Modeled sheet
  • Create number data entry columns, display as % (ex. 12 columns representing 12 months of the year) – this is where to input cascading percentages (aka curve)
  • Create calculated accounts for each data entry column and link
  • No timespan

Application, table

Description automatically generated with medium confidence

  1. 3. Revenue per product/customer by month
  • Modeled Sheet
    • With timespan Graphical user interface, application, table

Description automatically generated
  1. 4. Cohort Waterfall
  • Cube sheet
  • Create standard account as a trigger – in this case using active month designation
    • The active month designation to trigger what month the cohort waterfall calculates for each acquisition month
  • Create calculated account with formula using iff and switch (this serves as an index match)

iff(isblank(ACCT.Cohort_Waterfall.Cohort_ActiveMonths),blank(),

iff(this.version.isactuals,blank(),

ACCT.NewCustomers_byCohort.No_Customers[Sales Region=this, Sales Channel=this, Order Type=this, Products=this, Cohort Acquisition Month=this]

*

switch(ACCT.Cohort_Waterfall.Cohort_ActiveMonths,

1,ACCT.Cohort_Drivers.M1[Sales Region=this, Sales Channel=this, Order Type=this, Products=this],

2,ACCT.Cohort_Drivers.M2[Sales Region=this, Sales Channel=this, Order Type=this, Products=this],

3,ACCT.Cohort_Drivers.M3[Sales Region=this, Sales Channel=this, Order Type=this, Products=this],

4,ACCT.Cohort_Drivers.M4[Sales Region=this, Sales Channel=this, Order Type=this, Products=this],

5,ACCT.Cohort_Drivers.M5[Sales Region=this, Sales Channel=this, Order Type=this, Products=this],

6,ACCT.Cohort_Drivers.M6[Sales Region=this, Sales Channel=this, Order Type=this, Products=this],

7,ACCT.Cohort_Drivers.M7[Sales Region=this, Sales Channel=this, Order Type=this, Products=this],

8,ACCT.Cohort_Drivers.M8[Sales Region=this, Sales Channel=this, Order Type=this, Products=this],

9,ACCT.Cohort_Drivers.M9[Sales Region=this, Sales Channel=this, Order Type=this, Products=this],

10,ACCT.Cohort_Drivers.M10[Sales Region=this, Sales Channel=this, Order Type=this, Products=this],

11,ACCT.Cohort_Drivers.M11[Sales Region=this, Sales Channel=this, Order Type=this, Products=this],

12,ACCT.Cohort_Drivers.M12[Sales Region=this, Sales Channel=this, Order Type=this, Products=this],

0)))

Cohort modeling is a powerful feature in Workday Adaptive Planning. Try it out and see what insights you can discover.

Graphical user interface, application, table, Excel

Description automatically generated

Table

Description automatically generated

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.

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Check Boxes in Modeled Sheets

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Excel Reporting Using a Report Template

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Expand/Collapse Feature in OfficeConnect

Home » Planning & Reporting » Page 4

Filed Under: Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks Tagged With: Adaptive Planning, Financial Performance Management, Planning & Forecasting, Planning & Reporting, Workday Adaptive Planning, Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks

FP&A Done Right: Is Your Planning Process Hindering Decision Making?

June 18, 2021 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

This is a guest blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning, explaining how and why you should foster a culture of planning.

Long planning cycles. Short-lived plans. Siloed efforts. Hard-to-find errors. And never enough time for strategic analyses.

Do these FP&A issues ring a bell?

They should, if your planning processes are largely manual and mostly spreadsheet based, and don’t lend themselves to collaboration or version control.

An over-reliance on spreadsheets and legacy on-premises applications constrains the organization with rigid, siloed planning. These legacy planning environments are inflexible and brittle, prevent collaboration, and fail to deliver insights that drive decision-making.

Often, finance leaders are not even aware of how manual processes such as the gathering and consolidating of data, cumbersome email-based communication, and complex report creation put a strain on finance resources—a strain that keeps the finance team locked in low-value tasks. And while markets, revenue targets, and costs constantly move, old-world planning processes hinder related planning and reporting and slows decision-making to a crawl. Leaders either don’t have numbers they trust or don’t have the insights needed for agile decision-making.

Create value in all corners of the organization

Opportunities to grow are exceedingly challenging in a highly competitive and increasingly global environment. CFO research surveys typically characterize their corporate innovation efforts as highly successful. The success rate is low because getting the people, processes, and data all moving in the same direction can be difficult. To create value in all corners of the organization—sales, marketing, operations, and HR—everyone needs to fully engage with the planning process.

A siloed, spreadsheet-based approach leaves operational leaders in the dark and keeps business planning out of sight. Stakeholders don’t know where they are falling short; they can’t manage what they can’t see. While traditional planning functions on a rigid schedule (e.g., monthly), business operations are incredibly fluid. No business leader should be forced to wait until the month-end report is generated to make a decision. A finance team’s inability to provide insights in a timely manner hampers decision-making across the organization.

It’s no wonder that forward-thinking organizations are opening their eyes to a more effective and efficient way to plan—modern planning. Companies that adopt a modern planning process are better prepared to identify and take advantage of growth opportunities and operate more efficiently. Modern planning is collaborative, so you can plan as a team, and it’s continuous, so you can rapidly adapt to change.

Fostering a culture of planning

Instead of complex legacy applications and hordes of spreadsheets strewn across the organization, competitive organizations leverage cloud-based planning solutions to respond proactively to an ever-changing marketplace. Enterprise performance management solutions that integrate planning with source ERP, CRM, HR, and payroll systems offer a single version of the truth that fosters a culture of planning built on trust and real-time data.

Forward-thinking finance organizations recognize that planning will no longer suffice in a real-time, data-centric environment. The days of building elaborate spreadsheets to forecast the business trajectory—only to put them away until the next planning cycle—are fading quickly, at least at companies that want to remain competitive. A new modern planning model is emerging, centered around cloud-based tools to build accurate planning models faster, reduce errors, foster collaboration, and drive better decision-making. As stakeholders are more involved in the planning process, they’re gaining greater trust in the data. Leading finance organizations are using modern planning to:

  • Free up finance time and capacity
  • Improve the accuracy and integrity of finance and accounting data, plans, and reports
  • Accelerate cycle times for critical finance processes like month-end close, operational reporting, planning, and what-if analysis
  • Enhance collaboration with business stakeholders

In short, these finance organizations are leading with insights to drive business decisions and, in the process, elevating the role of finance to be more strategic.

Change starts at the top

Modern planning requires a cultural shift, but the rewards make it worth the effort. It can be difficult to get people to move from the comfort of their familiar spreadsheets to cloud-based collaborative planning tools, and the change has to start at the top.

The key to successfully transitioning to a modern planning model is thoughtful change management, wherein all parties understand the value of centralized planning tools and how they can contribute. When everyone takes ownership and knows how they are expected to add value, innovative planning, analytics, and performance measurement engage more people—including sales, marketing, operations, and HR—in the process of planning, moving away from the old, static models of the past.

The true payoff of modern planning is realized when everyone is working together on a continuously updated plan that incorporates fresh, valuable, and trusted data.

Tomorrow’s winners will be the most agile

In summary, modern planning means business agility. And business agility means organizations like yours can think fast, move first, and change rapidly, while maintaining control and stability. It means you can understand not only what’s going on but also how you could respond and what effect your actions would have.

It enables you to meaningfully digest the new volume, variety, and velocity of data by capturing it all in a single, intuitive, integrated environment, and surfacing the critical information you need to make decisions.

It brings your whole business together by broadening participation in planning and strategy to improve both day-to-day operations and your understanding of the overall dynamics of your business.

It’s continuous and company-wide, supported by a platform that’s easy-to-use, fast, and powerful. That makes it easier to model complex scenarios, link together operational and financial plans, monitor executional results, analyze past and current performance, and drill down into (or roll-up) fine-grain reporting from any area of the business.

The world isn’t going to slow down, and markets aren’t going to get less competitive. In the long-term (and probably before then) business agility isn’t going to be just a nice-to- have, or even a significant differentiator.

It’s going to be the deciding factor between the businesses that survive, and the businesses that wish they had.

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

Home » Planning & Reporting » Page 4

Filed Under: FP&A Done Right Tagged With: FP&A done right, Office of Finance, Planning & Forecasting, Planning & Reporting, xP&A

FP&A Done Right: Collaborate More When Planning

March 12, 2021 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

FP&A Done Right: Collaborate More When Planning

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

Home » Planning & Reporting » Page 4

Filed Under: FP&A Done Right Tagged With: Adaptive Insights, Budgeting Planning & Forecasting, enterprise performance management, FP&A, FP&A done right, Planning & Forecasting, Planning & Reporting

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Dimension Attribute Types

February 9, 2021 by Marc Assenza Leave a Comment

Tips & Tricks

Did you know that IBM Planning Analytics dimensions can have defined types and that these defined types are necessary for certain Planning Analytics features to operate correctly? For example, the new predictive forecasting functionality within Planning Analytics Workspace (PAW) requires the use of a designated Time dimension.

To view your dimension definitions in Planning Analytics Workspace, right-click on Dimensions and click “Edit settings” from the context menu.

IBM Planning Analytics Tips: Dimension Attribute Types

The dimensions view will open in Dimensions Security Mode. To see the dimension types, switch to Dimensions Attributes Mode.

IBM Planning Analytics Tricks: Dimension Attribute Types

Attributes for each dimension are then presented. Not every dimension needs to have a defined dimension type, but some dimensions need to be defined to use specific functionality. The following types can be defined:

  • GEOGRAPHY – Used in Planning Analytics Workspace to allow the visualization of your data using geographic maps.
  • TIME – Contains specified and recognized intervals of time utilized within a budgeting, planning, forecasting, and reporting structure.
  • CALCULATION – Contains formulas used to perform intended operations against your data.
  • METRIC – Contains a group or groups of elements that will be used to measure a business’s Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s).
  • METRIC INDICATORS – Provides further information in relation to Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s), an example of this is trend.
  • VERSIONS – Contains data from multiple uses of an element, such as current budget for a department for this year compared against the department’s budgets for prior years.
  • GENERIC – Used when there is no precise type of dimension type required. These general members can include things like products and customers. Please note this can be changed at any point if you determine the dimension should have had or needs to be a defined type.
  • HIERARCHY – This type of dimension is representative of the business reporting structure and can be used in tandem with workflow within an application.

This approach can be used with functionality associated with visualizations, predictive modeling, and other uses of Planning Analytics.

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!

Read more IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks:

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: PA Modeling – The Dimension Editor

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Simplifying Dimension Maintenance

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Subset Control Dimension

Home » Planning & Reporting » Page 4

Filed Under: IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks Tagged With: Budgeting Planning & Forecasting, enterprise performance management, Financial Performance Management, IBM Cognos TM1, IBM Planning Analytics, Planning & Forecasting, Planning & Reporting, Planning Analytics tips, Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks, TM1

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Excel’s NETWORKDAYS Function

January 26, 2021 by Lee Lazarow Leave a Comment

Have you ever wanted to define the number of working days between two calendar dates? Do you define “working days” simply as non-weekend days or do you also include holidays? Did you know that you can calculate this information using Excel’s NETWORKDAYS function?

The NETWORKDAYS function is used to determine the number of whole working days between start_date and end_date. Working days are defined as the exclusion of weekends, which in essence computes the number of Mondays through Fridays. The function also includes an optional parameter to exclude holidays and any other specific non-working days.

The syntax of the function is:

NETWORKDAYS (start_date, end_date, [holidays])
  • Start_date: This is required
  • End_date: This is required
  • Holidays: This is optional
    • This consists of a range of one or more dates to be excluded from the calendar. The list entails a range of cells that contains the dates.

Note: All dates are entered in date format or in serial number format

This information can be used to help calculate any/all of the following pieces of your model:

  • Benefit accruals and eligibility
  • Ratios such as “Revenue per day” or “Units per day”
  • Days remaining for end-of-service dates
  • Anything else that requires the number of days within the formula

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!

Read more Excel tips in our IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks series:

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Learn the Excel CELL Formula

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Excel TYPE Function

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Excel Keyboard Navigation

Home » Planning & Reporting » Page 4

Filed Under: IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks Tagged With: enterprise performance management, Excel, Excel NETWORKDAYS, excel tips, Excel tips & tricks, excel tricks, Financial Performance Management, IBM Cognos TM1, IBM Planning Analytics, lee lazarow, Planning & Forecasting, Planning & Reporting, Planning Analytics tips, Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks, TM1

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Convert Existing View Directly to Reports

November 24, 2020 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

Did you know that Planning Analytics for Excel (PAx) provides the ability to convert an existing view directly to a report in Excel? Without opening the view as an Exploration, you can start building your report directly from the Task Pane.

Just right-click on the view in the Task Pane to display the available options.

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Convert Existing View to Reports

You will see the following options by hovering over the Quick report, Dynamic report, and Custom report items:

How to convert existing views into reports in Planning Analytics

In this example, each of the items does the following:

  • On this sheet: This will open the existing Planning Analytics view as a Quick report on the current Excel sheet at cell $A$1.
  • On new sheet: This will open the view as a Quick report on a new sheet at cell $A$1.
  • At current location: This will open the view as a Quick report at the cell that is currently active.
  • At specified location: This will open a pop-up window that allows you to input the cell at which you would like the Quick report to appear. You can then enter the cell address and click OK to generate the Quick report, as shown in the following image.
Learn how to convert existing views to reports in Planning Analytics

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!

Read more IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks posts:

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: PAx Task Pane Workbook Tab

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: PAx Control Objects

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks Video: Using Drag & Drop to Change Selector Elements in PAx Reports

Home » Planning & Reporting » Page 4

Filed Under: IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks Tagged With: Analytics, Budgeting, Budgeting Planning & Forecasting, Financial Performance Management, IBM Cognos TM1, IBM Planning Analytics, Nina Gordy, Planning & Forecasting, Planning & Reporting, Planning Analytics tips, Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks, TM1

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: PAx Task Pane Workbook Tab

November 17, 2020 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

Did you know that Planning Analytics for Excel (PAx) automatically keeps track of the Planning Analytics objects you have open in an Excel workbook?

Simply click on the Workbook tab of your Task Pane to view the list of Dynamic reports, Action buttons, Explorations, and Quick reports that are currently in use.

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: PAx Task Pane Workbook Tab

These folders will be populated as you work with your Planning Analytics environment. Whether you manually add these items to a worksheet, or they are included in an existing view or report, they will appear here.

For example, clicking the Exploration button in the PAx ribbon will create an Exploration on a new worksheet.

The PAx task pane workbook tab in IBM Planning Analytics

This will also add an item to the Explorations folder on the Workbook tab of the Task Pane. When you right-click on the name of the new Exploration, you will see the following options:

Learn about the PAx task pane workbook tab in IBM Planning Analytics

Similar options appear for Dynamic reports, Action buttons, and Quick reports.

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!

Read more IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks:

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: PAx Control Objects

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: New PAx Features – Double Click

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks Video: Using Drag and Drop to Change Selector Elements in PAx Reports

Home » Planning & Reporting » Page 4

Filed Under: IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks Tagged With: Analytics, Budgeting, Budgeting Planning & Forecasting, Financial Performance Management, IBM Cognos TM1, IBM Planning Analytics, Nina Gordy, PAx, Planning & Forecasting, Planning & Reporting, Planning Analytics for Excel, Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks, TM1

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Alternative Row Formats for Excel Reports

November 10, 2020 by Lee Lazarow Leave a Comment

Tips & Tricks

In the early days of computing, printers often used paper that had alternating white and green areas which allowed the reader to easily follow a line of text across the page. This was known as “green bar” paper.  While we no longer use this type of paper, the concept is still applicable for situations where your output contains many columns that are hard to follow.

You can create this approach by using alternate row formats within your Excel reports.  This is done by combining two Excel formulas:

  • The ROW formula returns the row number for a cell reference. For example, ROW(K5) returns the number 5 since the cell is in the 5th row of the spreadsheet.
  • The MOD formula returns the remainder of two numbers after division. For example, MOD(9,2) returns the number 1.

When combined, the following formula will result in either a 1 or a 0:

=MOD(ROW(cell),2)

From there, you can use conditional formatting to define the fill colors. If you are doing this in standard Excel, then you can copy the formula throughout the applicable area.  If you are doing this within a dynamic report, then you can use it within the formatting area.

This approach allows you to make your wide reports easier to read. This also means that you can recreate the green bar format while you pull out your dot matrix printer and watch classic movies such as Wargames!

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!

Read more IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks posts:

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Learn the Excel CELL Formula

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Excel’s IFS Function

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Excel’s LET Function

Home » Planning & Reporting » Page 4

Filed Under: IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks Tagged With: Budgeting, Budgeting Planning & Forecasting, Financial Performance Management, IBM Cognos TM1, IBM Planning Analytics, lee lazarow, Planning & Forecasting, Planning & Reporting, Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks, Revelwood, TM1

  • « Go to Previous Page
  • Page 1
  • Page 2
  • Page 3
  • Page 4
  • Page 5
  • Page 6
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Page 23
  • Go to Next Page »

Footer

Revelwood Overview

Revelwood helps finance organizations close, consolidate, plan, monitor and analyze business performance. As experts in solutions for the Office of Finance, we partner with best-in-breed software companies by applying best practices guidance and our pre-configured applications to help businesses achieve their full potential.

EXPERTISE

  • Workday Adaptive Planning
  • IBM Planning Analytics
  • BlackLine

ABOUT

  • Who We Are
  • What We Do
  • How We Help
  • How We Think
  • Privacy

CONNECT

World Headquarters

Florham Park, NJ | 201 984 3030

European Headquarters

London & Edinburgh | +44 (0)131 240 3866

Latin America Office

Miami, FL | 201 987 4198

Email
info@revelwood.com

Copyright © 2025 · Revelwood Inc. All rights reserved. Revelwood® and the Revelwood logo are registered marks of Revelwood Inc.