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Revelwood Offers Open Enrollment for Workday Adaptive Planning OfficeConnect

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We have expanded our Workday Adaptive Planning Open Enrollment training courses. We now offer a new class, Introduction to OfficeConnect.

The course is designed for report developers with minimal experience with Workday Adaptive Planning’s OfficeConnect. Participants will learn:

  • OfficeConnect terminology and navigation.
  • How to create an OfficeConnect report dynamically linked to a Workday Adaptive Planning instance.
  • How to work with relative and static time-elements enabling you to create rolling report periods.
  • How to use parameters and labels to enable creating either a tabular Excel report or one report with selection options. A report with selection options is mainly used with the Level element from Workday Adaptive Planning.
  • How to link selected elements from a previously created Excel report to the matching Workday Adaptive Planning data. This enables you to use all of the creative presentation already existing in the report.

Additionally, participants will see a demonstration of the connectivity between OfficeConnect and its associated Word and PowerPoint applications.

Learning from Revelwood’s Workday Adaptive Planning Certified Experts

Revelwood’s Open Enrollment training courses for Workday Adaptive Planning are conducted online by our seasoned, Workday-certified instructors. Their goal is to give you the technical skills needed to understand, use and master Adaptive Planning.

These instructor-led courses allow you to ask questions and get instant answers from your instructor. They also provide you an environment where you can learn from your classmates – unlike many online classes. Participants will come away from the courses with best practices and new tips and tricks. 

Workday Adaptive Planning OfficeConnect

Workday Adaptive Planning OfficeConnect enables users to easily create presentation-quality financial reports in Microsoft Office. With OfficeConnect, you can integrate your latest data from Workday into Microsoft Office. For example, you can connect your existing Microsoft Excel reports to Workday Adaptive Planning. You can also create new reports. Refreshing those reports is as simple as a single click – no more need to manually transfer data.

OfficeConnect gives you full connectivity between Adaptive Planning and Microsoft Excel, Word and PowerPoint. You latest data in Adaptive Planning easily flows from financial reports to board books to management presentations.The OfficeConnect training courses are virtual (online) and occur on a regular basis. View our class schedule.

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Multi-Site Healthcare Organizations Rely on Workday Adaptive Planning

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The market for the multi-site healthcare industry is booming due to population growth, aging demographics, increasing healthcare needs and advancements in medical technology. There is continuing demand for convenient and accessible healthcare services provided by these organizations, which are often funded by private equity firms or joint ventures.

One of the biggest challenges facing multi-site healthcare organizations is scaling operations. They are often faced with a breakdown between operations and general and administrative (G&A) functions. This is particularly an issue with financial planning and analysis (FP&A), which includes budgeting, planning, forecasting and reporting.

Helping these multisite healthcare organizations with their FP&A processes and technologies is one of our specialties. Our team at Revelwood has worked with many of these organizations to transform their businesses. Here are just a few examples.

Dental

One of our clients is a dental organization with more than 240+ affiliated dental practices across 15 states. The organization provides centralized management and shared G&A services. We built a specialized, custom Workday Adaptive Planning-based FP&A solution that included:

  • Creating a dentistry operations model with volume-based modeling between dentistry and hygiene practices
  • Creating an orthodontics model with 24-month uneven revenue recognition including historical revenue and actuals
  • Building models for patient and volume-based revenue and staffing logic
  • Integrating Great Plains and PowerBI with Workday Adaptive Planning

Eye Care

Another Revelwood client is a leading provider of clinically integrated eye care, with a national network of over 700 optometrists, 300 ophthalmologists and a total workforce of 6,000 people. It has more than 700 affiliated practice locations with services that span the eye care continuum in 18 states and in 30 markets.

Revelwood built a customized, multisite healthcare budgeting and forecasting application for this organization. The solution included:

  • Assessing the data sources and incorporating a new SAP chart of accounts (COA)
  • Developing a plan to extract the data, re-map it and re-load it
  • Building distinct models for its optometry and ophthalmology practices
  • Creating models to enable budgeting and forecasting across locations, including number of patients, number of exams, number of operating days, historical price and rate inflation

Urgent Care

One of our clients is a recognized leader in health system urgent care joint-ventures. It is a physician-owned, physician-driven company committed to providing convenient access to quality, cost-effective healthcare services through a retail urgent care delivery model. 

Revelwood built a Workday Adaptive Planning FP&A system for the organization. The solution incorporates:

  • Corporate-level workforce planning for 250 full-time employees
  • Revenue forecasting by clinic, including per visit using historical averages, factoring in seasonality and different reimbursement rates
  • Comprehensive internal and external reporting, including reporting on budget versus actuals, department levels, income statements and more
  • An integration with Intaact

Learn more about how we are helping multi-site healthcare organizations. 

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Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Importing with Ease

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One of the key features of Workday Adaptive Planning is the ability to import data in mass efficiently, saving time and reducing errors. In this blog post, we will provide a step-by-step guide into the import process, providing detailed information on accessing import templates and correcting errors seamlessly within Adaptive Planning.

Understanding Import Templates for Workday Adaptive Planning

Import templates serve as structured frameworks that define the layout and formatting requirements for data uploads. These templates are essential for maintaining consistency and facilitating error-free data imports.

Accessing Import Templates

Here are the steps to access import templates in Workday Adaptive Planning.

  1. 1. Navigate to the specific sheet or module where data needs to be imported
  2. 2. Look for the “Actions” menu and select “Import Data” or a similar option
  3. 3. Choose the appropriate template based on the type of data you are importing.

In this example, we will use a simple Level import template found within Modeling > Levels

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.

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: A Practical Guide to Shared Formula Import

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Capital Summary Sheet – New & Existing Depreciation

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: How to Filter Data for Sage Intacct Integrations within Adaptive Staging Tables

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The Promise of AI in Finance

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This is a blog post from our partner Workday, explaining how CFOs can help bridge the AI trust gap.

Potential enterprise uses of artificial intelligence and generative AI have garnered plenty of attention in recent months. AI is the next business game-changer, but if employees don’t trust what it can do and how it’s being implemented, your transformation efforts will stall. That’s why it’s important to pay attention to the human side of the equation—and Workday CFO Zane Rowe sees an opportunity for finance leaders to bridge that AI trust gap.

“If you think about the opportunity that AI presents to everybody, it’s quite significant—and there’s a lot of excitement at the corporate level and at the leadership level,” he said in an interview at the 2024 World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. “But what the research highlighted, and maybe not unexpectedly, is a gap between leaders and corporate sponsors versus the average individual at a company.”

Rowe cited the Workday 2024 global study “Closing the AI Trust Gap.” Commissioned by Workday and conducted by FT Longitude, the survey of 1,375 business leaders and 4,000 employees across the globe found that:

  • 62% of business leaders (C-suite or their direct reports) welcome AI, and 52% of employees expressed the same sentiment
  • 23% of employees lack confidence that their organization puts employee interests above its own when implementing AI
  • 70% of business leaders agree AI should be developed in a way that allows for human review and intervention

For Rowe, the study’s findings present an opportunity for organizations to improve their relationship with employees.

“It warrants companies really understanding what that opportunity is for them, but then doing a good job and explaining that to the workforce,” he said.

The role of a CFO has always centered on data and numbers, as well as how that data is compiled and used to produce forecasts and financial reports, Rowe said. Technology, he added, holds the promise of greater efficiency and productivity, as well as value creation.

“What AI can do is enable us to do so much of that in far better ways and to think about: How do we grow that business?” Rowe said.

The promise of AI in finance requires leaders to imagine new ways of utilizing data to generate growth. It also means CFOs will need to build partnerships on the road to becoming finance futurists.

Rowe added that building trust is a critical component of that goal.

“As a CFO, how do we build credibility?” Rowe asked. “How do we think about transparency, and how do we communicate internally and externally—[about] the ways we’re utilizing that data in a transformative way?

“It’s really a time for company CFOs, in particular, to embed trust with that data so everyone at the company can understand how it’s being used and how important that is.”

Noting that Workday has clearly laid out its approach to responsible AI, Rowe touted the trust engendered with customers as a result of the company’s transparent approach. 

That trust component is an all-important part of driving AI adoption and doing so successfully.

“There’s no doubt that there’s a lot you can do, but it really comes down to the fundamentals of data platforms,” Rowe said. “And if you don’t watch that trust gap, if you can’t have the average employee and the average leader really understand how things are being used, it’ll be challenging. It’s an endeavor that we all have to put at the forefront and think about what to do to help scale AI.”

This blog post was originally published on the Workday blog.

More from our FP&A Done Right Series:

The Role of Generative AI in Forecasting

The Future of FP&A: Intelligent Forecasting

CFOs on AI, Partnerships and Skills

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Workday Adaptive Planning in Use: A Fireside Chat with Ben Hart, CFO of Texans Credit Union

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In a recent Fireside Chat, we had the opportunity to delve into the world of financial insights with Ben Hart, the CFO of Texans Credit Union. The conversation provided a glimpse into how using Workday Adaptive Planning has transformed financial processes within the credit union. 

Watch the recorded Fireside Chat:

Navigating the Financial Landscape

In the first part of the chat, Ben highlighted the challenges posed by the 18-month-long rising rate environment and the crucial role of pricing loans. The credit union leveraged the capabilities of Adaptive to ensure expected returns on various products. The dashboard in Adaptive allowed for real-time visualization and scenario comparisons – something that was impossible to do with static spreadsheets.

From Static to Dynamic: A Paradigm Shift

Ben emphasized the profound differences between the old and new processes and the transformative power of Adaptive. The ability to run “what if” scenarios, create visualizations on the fly, and assess the impact of assumptions in real time has provided a level of agility and responsiveness that was previously unattainable. Now that Texans CU is no longer bound by the limitations of static spreadsheets, the finance team can navigate financial complexities with ease, providing stakeholders with immediate, data-driven insights.

Collaborative Customization: Partnering with Revelwood

The chat also touched upon the collaborative effort with Revelwood in customizing Adaptive for Texans CU. Ben shed light on the necessity of engaging an external partner to expedite the budgeting component for their 2023 budgets. Revelwood not only facilitated the process but also played a crucial role in imparting knowledge to Ben’s team, ensuring a seamless transition and empowering them to become self-sufficient users of Adaptive.

Unlocking the Full Potential

Despite the evident success and positive feedback, Ben acknowledged that there’s more to explore in terms of Adaptive’s potential. Looking ahead, he wants to fine-tune income statements based on cost centers, moving beyond the current enterprise-wide focus. The scalability of Adaptive, in Ben’s view, ensures that the credit union will never outgrow the solution, allowing it to adapt to evolving needs seamlessly.

Real-Time Results and Continuous Improvement

One of the standout features highlighted by Ben was the ability to achieve real-time results during crucial financial discussions. Whether it’s assessing the impact of CapEx needs with the IT department or navigating the intricacies of the 2024 budget process, Adaptive allows for immediate insights, aligning stakeholders with the financial implications of their decisions.

The Decision to Engage External Expertise

Closing the conversation, Ben shed light on the decision to collaborate with an external consulting firm like Revelwood. The need for a quick and efficient onboarding, coupled with the desire for a higher level of expertise, were pivotal factors. The external partnership not only accelerated the implementation process but also brought a creative perspective, leveraging years of experience with Adaptive.

The Fireside Chat with Ben Hart provided a fascinating look into the evolving landscape of financial planning within credit unions. As the financial industry continues to evolve, insights from leaders like Ben offer valuable guidance for credit unions seeking to navigate a dynamic and challenging landscape.

Read more from this series:

Workday Adaptive Planning Customers See 249% ROI

Unlocking Success: Harnessing Customer Satisfaction Metrics with Workday Adaptive Planning

Aged to Perfection: The Whiskey Model for Workday Adaptive Planning

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Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Data Organization with Microsoft Power Query

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In the world of business, data analysis and interpretation are essential to creating effective, well-informed decisions. However, messy and unorganized data can create serious roadblocks in this process, leading to inefficiencies, and lost opportunities. Fortunately, Microsoft Power Query is a powerful tool designed to eliminate the headaches and tedious tasks related to creating clean and accurate data. The first step is to organize your data.

What is Microsoft Power Query?

Microsoft Power Query is in Excel under the data tab under the “Get and Transform Data” group option. It is designed for data transformation that can also be used for other Microsoft applications such as Power BI and Power Automate. The tool allows users to connect to various data sources, transform data into the desired format, and load it into their preferred destination in ways that native Excel functions such as formulas and pivot tables cannot. 

Benefits of Using Microsoft Power Query

Data from Multiple Sources: Power Query acts as a one-stop shop for you to connect to a wide range of data sources, including databases, spreadsheets, web services, and more. This means you can gather data from multiple sources in one place for analysis.

Data Transformation: With Power Query’s intuitive interface, you can easily clean, reshape, and transform data without writing complex code. It offers a range of functions and transformations to suit your needs.

Automation: Power Query enables automation of data extraction and transformation processes. This reduces manual errors and saves time, especially when working with large datasets.

Reusable Queries and Data Volume: The tool saves a history of previous queries for future use. This allows users to reuse processes for similar datasets, saving time and effort. Additionally, queries can import copious records of data that would not fit into a standard Excel worksheet.  

Data Connection: Updates from the source data are seamlessly integrated into your Power Query process. This ensures that your analysis is always based on the most up-to-date information.

Data Organization with Power Query

1. Data Connection

To start organizing and cleaning data using Power Query, you need to establish a connection to your data source. In this example, the data is in an Excel worksheet as a table. 

Loading the table can be done via the “From Table/Range” option in Excel or the relevant data source connector in other Microsoft applications.

2. Data Import and Preview

Once your data source is connected, Power Query displays a preview of your data. This step allows you to review the data’s structure and make initial decisions about what needs to be cleaned or transformed.

3. Removing Duplicates

Duplicate data can skew your analysis. Power Query provides a simple way to remove duplicate rows, ensuring that your data is clean and accurate. To do this, highlight the desired columns and select “Remove Rows” and the “Remove Duplicates” option.

4. Filtering Data

You can filter data based on specific criteria. This can be helpful when you need to focus on a particular subset of your data. Find the drop-down menu above each column header to easily filter your data.

5. Data Transformation

Power Query provides a wide range of transformation options. You can perform tasks like splitting columns, merging data, renaming columns, and more. These transformations help you reshape the data to fit your analysis needs. To rename, simply double-click the column header and type the desired name.

6. Reporting

After making the desired changes to your data, return the data back to excel by selecting the “Close & Load” option and selecting “Close & Load To.” Then select the desired output in the following window. 

Additionally, Pivot tables can be used to retrieve data directly from Power Query. This can be helpful when the data set does not fit in a native Excel spreadsheet. To do this, select “Close & Load” in Power Query, and select “Close & Load To.” From the following dialogue box, select “Only Create Connection.” Now you can insert a Pivot Table using an external data source and select your query.

Microsoft Power Query is an indispensable tool for professionals working with data. Whether you’re dealing with financial records, customer information, or any other dataset, Power Query simplifies the process of data organization and cleansing, saving you time and ensuring data accuracy. 

Check back soon for our next blog post on Microsoft Power Query. We’ll share tips on using Microsoft Power Query to cleanse your data.

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

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Limit the Drill Down List on a Workday Adaptive Planning Report

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Restrictions on Cube Sheets

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Metadata Loaders

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Limit the Drill Down List on a Workday Adaptive Planning Report

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Our latest Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks video features Michelle Song, a senior consultant at Revelwood, demonstrating how easy it is to limit the drill down list on a Workday Adaptive Planning report. This new feature will transform how you – and your end users – interact with your Adaptive Planning reports. 

Watch this video to learn how to:

  • Access the report
  • Edit the report properties
  • Select the relevant dimensions
  • Apply your changes
  • Save and Run

Now, when you click on an account name, you’ll be greeted with only the dimensions you’ve deemed pertinent. No more hunting for the right information or risking confusion for end-users!

By fine-tuning your reports, you’re not just saving time but also enhancing the overall user experience. No more distractions, no more unnecessary options—just precise, actionable insights.

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

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Metadata Loaders

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Reordering Parent and Children Cube Accounts in Cube Sheets

Workday Adaptive Planning Framework: Purchase Order Management for Organization-Wide Planning

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Reporting in Workday Adaptive Planning

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Do you know how easy it is to create a report in Workday Adaptive Planning? Watch this short video to get an overview of a typical variance report, see how to easily create a new report, and how to use OfficeConnect to combine data from Adaptive Planning with Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint.

Viewers will learn how to:

  • Create a new matrix report, dragging and dropping data onto a canvas
  • Drill into data to investigate variances and other issues
  • Incorporate data from Adaptive Planning into an Excel report.

Workday Adaptive Planning has many easy and flexible options for reporting. One of its most powerful features is the ability to bring any type of data into Adaptive Planning.

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Planning in Workday Adaptive Planning

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In this demonstration, we explain how to do Planning in Workday Adaptive Planning. Workday Adaptive Planning is used by companies of all sizes, across all industries, for annual budgeting, monthly forecasting, what-if scenario planning and more.

Watch this video to learn how to do common planning activities, as well as to see some of Adaptive Planning’s most popular features.

As we look at a typical expense sheet, you’ll see:

  • The importance of color coding in Adaptive Planning
  • How to do forecasting, including 3+9 forecasting
  • Different ways you can display your data
  • Shortcuts for entering data
  • Options for to using the breakback method
  • Cell-level audit trail features
  • Model Sheets
  • Cube Sheets
  • Planning directly in a dashboard
  • How to do what-if scenarios

Revelwood has many video demonstrations of Workday Adaptive Planning. Check out our Quick Takes on Workday Adaptive Planning or check back for the next expanded demonstration of Adaptive Planning.

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