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Streamlining Nonprofit Financial Planning with Workday Adaptive Planning

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Nonprofit organizations play a vital role in our society, but managing their finances can be a complex task. To ensure responsible fiscal management and transparency, nonprofits need efficient and accurate budgeting, planning, and reporting systems. Many non-profit organizations have selected Workday Adaptive Planning for planning, forecasting and reporting. By leveraging the advanced features of Workday Adaptive Planning, nonprofits can streamline their financial planning processes, gain real-time visibility, and make data-driven decisions to support their mission.

The Challenges of Nonprofit Financial Management

Nonprofits face unique challenges in managing their finances. They must handle multiple funds, programs, and locations while planning for different grant sizes and distributions. Traditional spreadsheet-based systems are prone to human error, are time-consuming and lack the scalability required for active planning and reporting. These limitations can hinder nonprofits’ ability to operate within their means, demonstrate transparency to donors and stakeholders and adapt to changing circumstances effectively.

Workday Adaptive Planning: Empowering Nonprofits 

Workday Adaptive Planning offers a powerful solution specifically tailored to meet the planning needs of nonprofit organizations. With its multidimensional, driver-based modeling capabilities, nonprofits can accurately plan revenues and expenses across their complex organizational structures. The integration of profit and loss (P&L) and cash flow planning ensures accurate cash projections, enabling nonprofits to make informed financial decisions.

Workday Adaptive Planning also facilitates detailed staff planning, allowing organizations to allocate resources and report on fully loaded costs by employee. It empowers budget owners by providing them with ownership of the planning process, fostering collaboration and accountability within the organization.

Enhanced Visibility and Real-time Analytics

One of the key advantages of Workday Adaptive Planning is its ability to provide real-time visibility through a flexible and intuitive interface. Nonprofits can analyze key drivers across various aspects of their organization, generating reports at varying levels of granularity. This visibility allows them to identify variances between planned and actual behavior, enabling proactive adjustments to stay on track with their financial goals. 

Workday Adaptive Planning empowers nonprofit organizations to streamline their financial planning processes, gain clear insights into their financials, and demonstrate responsible fiscal management. By leveraging this comprehensive solution, nonprofits can optimize their budgeting, planning, and reporting, supporting their mission and making a positive impact in the communities they serve.

Learn more about how Workday Adaptive Planning can help your non-profit organization. Join us on Thursday, August 24, 2023, at 2:00pm for a webinar on Upgrading Non-Profit FP&A Efficiency with Workday Adaptive Planning.

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Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Alternate Calendars (Time Strata)

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Workday Adaptive Planning is a great planning tool due to its suitability for organizations in a wide variety of industries. However, one challenge is the inability to have multiple calendars to plan by. Some companies need this feature in order to accurately create budgets and forecasts. 

The exciting news is that Adaptive Planning’s most recent release now lets the user import an alternate calendar!

This new release allows the user to import up to three alternate calendars. To do so, the user must go to the Time selection under the Modeling section.


By using the TimeStructure spreadsheet, the user can add columns that map the leaf strata of the original calendar to the new alternate calendar. 

When adding in a new calendar it is important to make sure that there is at least one common time strata, or fork, to share with the default calendar. Typically, this would be the month.

Additionally, when creating a new calendar, the user must also make sure that it shares the smallest strata with the original calendar. 

In the picture above you can see an example where the company has a fiscal calendar that begins in April and ends in March, and a standard calendar that follows January through December.

Notice how the first code, label, and short name columns all have the shared month intersection populated with the dates. This is the lowest fork in the example that enables Adaptive Planning to line up these calendars together.

This is a great new feature that will help many Adaptive Planning clients!

Visit Revelwood’s Knowledge Center for our Adaptive Insights Tips & Tricks or sign up here to get our Adaptive Insights Tips & Tricks delivered directly to your inbox. Not sure where to start with Adaptive Insights? Our team here at Revelwood can help! Contact us info@revelwood.com for more information

This blog post was co-authored by Ben Alcock, associate consultant at Revelwood and Julia Seelin, associate consultant at Revelwood.

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: How to Create a Dimension

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Reusable Reports

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Crosstabs – The Significance of and How to Build

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Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: How to Create a Dimension

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Dimensions are a key element of Workday Adaptive Planning. Creating a dimension is very easy. Here are some approaches to create dimensions in Workday Adaptive Planning.

The first thing to consider is hierarchy. It is Revelwood’s best practice to keep dimensions flat, meaning with no hierarchy at all, and leave that to dimension attributes. (I will cover more in detail in an upcoming blog post.) We like to keep them flat in order to tag them with dimension attributes. This is very useful when further breaking down dimensions by different categories. If we need dimensions to be in a hierarchy, we build that structure as attributes and keep dimensions flat at the leaf most level.

To add a dimension in Adaptive Planning, select the three lines and navigate to modeling and click Dimensions. At the top of the screen notice this little Create new dimension button. 

Click it and give your new dimension a name and unique code.

Now from here there’s a couple ways to add values to your new dimension.

The first is to add it manually. Select your new dimension and click this icon next to the previous create new dimension button, the Create new dimension value button. 

From here, give each dimension value a name and a unique code. This could take a while, which is why I recommend one of the next two options instead of the manual process.

The second possible way is via an import. First we need an import template. Click this Import dimension structure button

and download an import template. Open it, and in column A on the first row only, write the name of your overall dimension. 

In the next row in column F and G, include the unique dimension value code and name from your data source. 

Save and return to Adaptive Planning. Choose your new file and click import. If all goes well you’ve saved a ton of time populating your new dimension.

The third choice is by far the easiest and fastest method. To import dimension values select the check box Data import automatically creates new dimension values:

The parent dimension is already created. Tagging data you’re going to import with a nonexistent dimension value will cause Adaptive Planning to automatically populate your new dimension.

And that’s it for creating dimensions! 

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: Reusable Reports

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Crosstabs – The Significance of and How to Build

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Creating an Excel File Data Source

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Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Reusable Reports

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As a relative newcomer to Workday Adaptive Planning, I find the Reusable reports function particularly useful.

The ability to create a Reusable Report is a function in Adaptive Planning that preserves the elements and format of a previously saved Matrix Report. Row and column segments that have been organized and formatted are added to the element pane and are able to be dragged and dropped on any new Matrix Report to quickly add structure.

A good use for Reusable Reports is when building multiple reports for a version that occurs during the same time period. After formatting this once, you can easily drag and drop each segment to a new report and your time and version structure will carry over. Another use is combining reports – it’s  as easy as saving one or both as reusable and then adding it to the bottom of the other to display them together.

Here is how to save an already created Matrix Report as reusable and use it to quickly create another similarly structured report.

The example report we’re going to use displays the revenue of each product group and total Product Revenue for the year 2019, in the Version: “Last Year Budget – Approved”.

Below shows the behind-the-scenes Report Editor for the above report.

Notice how the columns are expanded to show each quarter as well as the full year total. This is a format choice made in the Elements Pane that we want to reuse in the next report we build.

To make this a Reusable Report, first find the report on the Reports Overview page.

Right click on the report and select “Add to Reusable Reports”

Now we’re going to create a new Matrix Report that displays the maintenance revenue of each account and total maintenance revenue for the same year and version as the 2019 Product Revenue report.

Create a new Matrix Report and look at the bottom of the Elements Pane on the left, notice the section for Reusable Reports.

From here, expand the report you want to reuse and drag and drop the desired elements/segments. In this example, we want to reuse the column segment and its formatting.

Add to the row axis the element you wish to display on your new report, in this case we want the account, Maintenance Revenue.

Select Save and Run, and just like that, you’ve used a Reusable Report to quickly create a similar but different report that follows the same time and version formatting as the other!

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: Crosstabs – The Significance of and How to Build

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Creating an Excel File Data Source

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Data Integration and the Planning Data Source

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Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Utilizing Split Row and Allocation Timespan

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Did you know Workday Adaptive Planning makes it easy to split individuals between multiple departments within a personnel sheet? 

In our latest Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks video, Dave Miersch, Revelwood’s Practice Leader for Workday Adaptive Planning, demonstrates how to:

  • Ensure the columns in a personnel sheet are suitable to the areas you want them to be split to
  • Assign specific columns to be split
  • Do splits by levels and allocation percentages
  • Split individuals by multiple departments
  • Flex percentages up and down
  • Make the account structure to be reflective of new allocations, and more. 

Watch the video to learn how to allocate your personnel between different departments. 

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 at info@revelwood.com for more information.

Learn more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Utilizing Split Rows in Modeled Sheets

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

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Flexible 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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Dashboarding in Workday Adaptive Planning

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Are you eager to learn how easy it is to create a dashboard in Workday Adaptive Planning? Dashboards are a great way to convey performance data and monitor your business. Watch this video for a hands-on demonstration on how to do dashboarding.

We give you an overview of Workday Adaptive Planning Dashboards and the types of tiles you can have in your dashboard. There’s almost no limit on what you can do as long as you bring the data into Adaptive Planning.

Viewers will then learn how to:

  • Create a new dashboard
  • Drag a visualization on to the canvas
  • Drag data onto a visualization
  • Break down data and drill-down into details

You’ll also see how to add a KPI and a line chart to your dashboard.

One of the great things about Adaptive Planning is that as soon as you create the dashboard, the data is accessible in it.

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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