Workday

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.

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!

Limiting the Scope of Calculated Accounts

August 20, 2025 by Revelwood

Both modeled and cubed sheets in Workday Adaptive Planning allow the user to set a scope to limit the calculation for calculated accounts for both actuals and planned data. A user may utilize this feature to allow calculations to start at a certain point, without having to alter the actuals or plan version start date.

In order to limit the scope of the calculated accounts, you will begin by navigating to the back end of the sheet and go to columns and levels. Once you are at columns and levels, you can press the sheet properties gear in the middle of the screen.

Once you have navigated to the sheet properties, press the last tab that is titled “Scope.” This is where you will have the option to limit the scope for calculated accounts.

You now have the ability to set the scope either forward or backwards for actual values or plan values as well. For the actuals, the drop down for the start/stop calculating gives you an option to select start/end of version, month, quarter, year. For the plan, the drop down for start/stop gives you the option of left scroll limit, end of plan, month, quarter, year.

In the example above, we set the scope so that the plan values do not start until 6 months after the start of the plan. As you can see from the start date, it should start 1/1/2025, but from the row details we can see that the calculations do not begin until July.

Workday Named a Leader in IDC MarketScape Report for MidMarket Organizations

August 14, 2025 by Revelwood

Our partner, Workday, has been named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Enterprise Planning, Budgeting, and Forecasting Applications for Midmarket Organizations 2024 Vendor Assessment, which was issued in late 2024.

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The IDC study assessed vendors in the worldwide enterprise planning, budgeting and forecasting applications that focus on midmarket organizations. The evaluation is based on a “comprehensive and rigorous framework that assesses each vendor relative to the criteria and to one another.

Vendor requirements to be included in this report included:

Have 50% of its enterprise planning, budgeting and forecasting applications revenue from the midmarket segment.
Have business operations in two or more regions worldwide.
Have market presence and momentum based on IDC inquiry volume.

Download this report to learn why:

The latest functionality being added to enterprise planning, budgeting and forecasting applications is AI-/ML- and generative AI (GenAI)-based functionality.
Applications continue to be enriched with improvements in collaboration and collective intelligence capabilities
Market uncertainty and volatility have increased demand for more robust what-if or scenario planning and analysis capabilities.

Key Highlights on Workday:

Workday is in the Leaders category for this IDC MarketScape for its Workday Adaptive Planning offering. The report cites Workday’s strengths as:

Workday Adaptive Planning is user-friendly for both data modelers and business users.
There is a strong ecosystem of implementation partners (like us!).
The software is feature-rich, with extensive planning, analytics and data management functionality.

Download your copy of the study today.

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

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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.

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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

Using Integration to Hard Code Calculated Values

July 23, 2025 by Mary Luchs

While it’s super helpful to have the ability to lock your plan versions in Workday Adaptive Planning, it’s not a perfect solution all the time. A “locked” version will prevent users from entering new data or updating formulas, but the formulas themselves are not prevented from recalculating when the formula input values change. This becomes particularly problematic when we are using time modifiers in our formulas.

The most common example I encounter is when we’re using some sort of trailing average calculation to populate a budget. For example, if you’re creating a 2026 budget with trailing 12 month average calculations for your operating expenses, those 2026 values will continue to change until 2025 is closed. While there are many formulaic ways around this, I like the option to use an Adaptive data source integration to hard code the values and prevent future changes to the data.

Using an Adaptive data source integration works really well when we are using shared formulas, since they are natively able to be overridden. You can manually override these formulas by typing over them in a cell on a sheet in Adaptive, but you might not know that you can override them through an import as well. A general overview of the process is as follows:

Adding a new source to your Adaptive data source for the data you want to hard code (You will need to create a “Workday Adaptive Planning” data source as a planning data source if this hasn’t been done yet. A helpful walkthrough of this step can be found here).
Creating a Planning Data Loader that takes that formulaic data from the staging table and pushes that same data back into the same data intersections as hard coded values.
Running that loader for the version and time periods you want it to run for. Running the loader is what triggers the formula overrides.
As the last step, lock the version you pushed into so that the hard coded values that were integrated cannot be changed in the future.

Once this loader is set up, it can be easily reused by changing the versions and the time periods it’s being run for. It is a great process to have in your back pocket for preventing changes in your budget versions.

Revelwood is an award-winning, Platinum Solution Provider for Workday Adaptive Planning. We build solutions for the Office of Finance that minimize your risk by seamlessly incorporating business analytics into your everyday thinking. By combining the software with our best practices and out-of-the-box applications, we help businesses achieve their full potential with Workday Adaptive 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:

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:

Limiting the Scope of Calculated Accounts

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Workday Named a Leader in IDC MarketScape Report for MidMarket Organizations

Vendor requirements to be included in this report included:

Download this report to learn why:

Key Highlights on Workday:

Download your copy of the study today.

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

Using Integration to Hard Code Calculated Values

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

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Workday

Why You May Need to Extend Your Time Strata

Steps to extend your time strata

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

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:

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Vendor requirements to be included in this report included:

Download this report to learn why:

Key Highlights on Workday:

Download your copy of the study today.

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

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

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