Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Metadata Loaders

October 4, 2023 by Julia Seelin

A key component of Workday Adaptive Planning is the ability to pull in actual data through integration. However, there is more you can do with this access to the data source. There is the ability to load in dimensions from the data source and have them automatically added to that specific dimension. This is done through a Metadata Loader. A Metadata Loader can only bring in one dimension at a time, but it will connect to an existing dimension and add any new values that are loaded into the data source.

In order to create this loader, the correct data table must be brought in the source data, as depicted below.

The next step consists of creating the planning dimension loader and filling out the Data Source Settings for the dimension. You would select the newly added data table as the source table. You then select the planning dimension it correlates with already in the instance.

Lastly, you map the columns, based on the source table, to ensure the necessary details are pulled in.

In order to ensure the correct names and codes are being pulled in correctly, it is recommended to run a preview of the output. If the loader was done correctly, a file will be produced that displays the desired information. From here, the loader is ready to be added to a task so that it will run as often as desired.

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.

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

March 29, 2023 by Revelwood

Purchase orders are typically viewed from a procurement perspective – usually to make key decisions about sales and inventory, or to audit vendors. But they can also provide the finance and project management teams with important information for planning processes. You can give key members of your planning team more direct access to these purchase orders by incorporating them into Workday Adaptive Planning.

In this video, Haley Elliot, presales solutions consultant here at Revelwood, demonstrates how Workday Adaptive Planning’s purchase order functionality can be used as a unified data point for teams across the organization. These include procurement, finance and project management.

By incorporating purchase orders with Workday Adaptive Planning you can transform your purchase order details from siloed and static information into dynamic forecasts that can be leveraged in a planning process across multiple business units in your organization.

This video is a Workday-approved planning template and is a conceptual framework for clients deploying Workday Adaptive Planning. This framework for purchase order management adheres to best-practice guidelines and has been validated by Workday with Revelwood clients who have successfully used it.

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.

Learn More about Workday Adaptive Planning:

Fueling Business Agility with Continuous Planning

FP&A Done Right: ESG – An Imperative for Growth

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

Workday Adaptive Planning Framework: ASC 606 Revenue Recognition

March 15, 2023 by Revelwood

ASC 606 is a revenue recognition standard that affects all businesses that enter into contracts with customers to transfer goods or services. It impacts public, private and non-profit entities. It provides a framework for businesses to recognize revenue more consistently.

Incorporating the requirements of ASC 606 revenue recognition into a forecast requires a fine-tuned and easy-to-use way to manage a variety of variables. In this video, Haley Elliott, presales solutions consultant here at Revelwood, demonstrates how to perform ASC 606 revenue recognition in Workday Adaptive Planning.

Workday Adaptive Planning allows subscription-based SaaS companies to account for ASC 606 regulations in a centralized location with powerful visuals, giving you increased accuracy and insight into your revenue forecast.

This video is a Workday-approved planning template and is a conceptual framework for clients deploying Workday Adaptive Planning. This framework for ASC 606 revenue recognition reporting adheres to best-practice guidelines and has been validated by Workday with Revelwood clients who have successfully used it.

Learn More about Workday Adaptive Planning:

FP&A Done Right: ESG – An Imperative for Growth

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

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

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

October 26, 2022 by Revelwood

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.

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

The Cost of Spreadsheet Errors

October 20, 2022 by Revelwood

Using disconnected spreadsheets for forecasting, budgeting, planning and reporting creates a host of issues, including:

Wasting weeks every year manually consolidating a mass of individual spreadsheets
Inability to easily model potential future scenarios or answer what-if questions
Measuring actual spend against plan is a major chore
Talented finance staff spends too much time on low-level, non-value add activities.

These challenges are ongoing and exponential. The longer you rely on spreadsheets for “collaborative” planning, the higher the costs are. Most of these costs are “soft” costs – time, manpower, delays. But there are hard costs too – in the form of errors. Some of these errors might be small. Some might have a significant impact on your company. Here are a few examples:

Famous Spreadsheet Errors

J.P. Morgan’s “White Whale” debacle was a result of a spreadsheet user error. The firm was using Excel spreadsheets to model Value at Risk (VaR) for the Chief Investment Office. The model was built by copying and pasting data from one spreadsheet to another. Several cells in this model contained faulty equations due to a failed copy-and-paste process. This led the firm to severely underestimate the downside risk of one of its credit portfolios, which led to approximately $6.5 billion in losses and fines.

The municipality of West Baraboo, Wisconsin, relied on spreadsheets to calculate how much its borrowing would cost. The spreadsheet had a sum that was missing one cell. This resulted in West Baraboo underestimating the total cost of a 10-year bond, meaning the village had to pay $400,000 more interest on the bond than it originally thought.

Lazard, Ltd. Is an investment bank that advised SolarCity Corp. The bank had a computational error in a spreadsheet. This error led Lazard to discount the value of SolarCity Corp by $400 million. This happened when Tesla Motors Inc. was purchasing SolarCity Corp.

When Vista Equity Partners purchased Tibco Software, Tibco shareholders received $100 million less than originally anticipated. This was a result of a spreadsheet error that overstated Tibco’s equity value.

The chances might be slim of your company suffering one of these financial disasters. But if you are still relying on spreadsheets for forecasting, budgeting, planning and reporting, you are likely to be experiencing one – if not many – of the nine circles of spreadsheet hell.

What are they? Download this eBook, The Nine Circles of Spreadsheet Hell, to learn them – and the hidden costs of spreadsheets.

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

September 14, 2022 by Dave Miersch

Did you know you can create an Excel file spreadsheet data source for Workday Adaptive Planning?

Watch Dave Miersch, Revelwood’s Practice Leader for Workday Adaptive Planning, demonstrate how to create and use an Excel file as a data source for Adaptive Planning. Dave shows you how to:

Use any data source, such as from an ERP system or data warehouse
Create a new data source
Find and select the spreadsheet option
Name the data source
Import the spreadsheet

Adaptive Planning makes it very easy to import and export an Excel spreadsheet!

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

August 17, 2022 by Marc Assenza Leave a Comment

Did you know that Workday Adaptive Planning integrations can use the metadata in Adaptive Planning as a part of the integration?

It’s true! The process requires setting up the credential and setting up a data source for Adaptive Planning. You must have the proper credentials yourself within Adaptive Planning to set this up.

To set up the credential you will need to do the following:

From the Workday navigation button, go to Integration🡪Design Integrations

You will arrive at the following screen. Under the Component Library section click on the Credentials option.

From the list that is presented, the first option is to Create a new Credential, select this.

Once clicked, the following list will be presented, select Planning Credential, and give it a name. Giving it a name that is meaningful matters, Adaptive certainly fits the bill here.

Once created, you will see that your credential exists under credentials in the Component Pane, but no access to the data source has been granted yet because no authorized user has been assigned. To assign an authorized user (a user with the rights to perform all these steps) to the credentials, you follow the on-screen instructions and click “Authorize” under the Actions panel.

When you click authorize, the following appears, enter the credentials in the pop-up screen and click “Authorize” on the lower right-hand portion of the screen.

Next you will want to click the Save button to save the login information with the credential.

The next step will be to Test the connection. This is done by clicking on “Test Connection” under the Actions pane. A pop-up window will display, click on “Test.” If the login credentials are valid, the following window will appear and the credential is all set up.

To set up the data source, you will need to do the following:

Under the Component Library, click on Data Sources.

Click on the option “Create New Data Source.”

Here again select Planning Data Source and give it a meaningful name, keeping the name the same in this example and calling it Adaptive.

Once the Data Source is created, the following screen will appear. Here you will assign the Data Source the Credential that was created in step 1 and save it.

You will notice that no tables have appeared. That is because we have not defined them yet.

On the left-hand side under Actions, click on “Manage Sources.”

The following popup window will appear, click on the sources folder first, then click on the Add button.

You will now see a list; in the example we will import metadata about Accounts and Levels. Those two will be selected.

You have the option to rename the source, so Accounts and Levels will be used in place of the default name.

No tables are in the Data Source yet because the Data Source needs to be saved and the structure needs to be imported. Click the Save option first followed by “Import Structure.”

The table structures are now present as seen below.

The next step is to import the data, this is done by clicking “Import Data” under the Actions pane.

That’s all it takes to set up the credential and the Adaptive Data Source, now you’re ready to utilize it in the Staging area for integration however you see fit!

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

August 3, 2022 by Dillon Rossman Leave a Comment

Do you know how to utilize splits in Workday Adaptive Planning for a modeled sheet? Splits allow you to have multiple lines as part of one record and you can set splits on a column-by-column basis.

A use case might be a personnel model in which you want the ability to allocate a single employee to multiple departments. To turn on splits, navigate to the settings of your modeled sheet and click “Columns and Levels.”

From here, click on the “Sheet Properties” button

Within the pop-up menu, click on “Settings” then enable “Allow Splits” and hit “OK”

Once this is completed, you will notice each column now has a checkbox for “Split.” In this example we will turn this on for the “Department” and “Allocation” columns.

Within our sheet we have an existing row for John Smith. In order to create split rows we just have to right-click on John Smith’s row and select “Split Row.”

Once the split row is added you will see that only the two columns we designated with splits are split. The information from the consolidated row gets carried down to the split rows for the non-split columns.

In this example I will create two split rows. I’d like to allocate John Smith to two departments. After adding a second two split row, updating the information, and saving the sheet, you will now see two split rows that are each allocated 50% to their department and a consolidated row that totals up to a 100% allocation.

You could have accomplished the same end result with multiple independent rows, however, splits provide several benefits including:

Non-split columns will automatically copy the consolidated row data to the split rows.
Split rows are grouped together.
Groupings show the summations of split column values, in this example you can see the allocation percentages add up to 100%. Independent rows would not clearly show you an employee is allocated 100%.

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

July 20, 2022 by Marc Assenza Leave a Comment

Did you know that Workday Adaptive Planning can use Microsoft Excel Workbooks as Data Sources for Data Integration?

It’s true! The process is surprisingly simple if a few basic rules and steps are followed:

Your column names, positions, and formatting should remain consistent once you decide upon the layout. In the example below, Period, Value, Account and Level will always be in the same order with the same consistent formatting on a moving forward basis.

The name of your worksheet within the workbook will need to remain the same. Within the Workday Adaptive integration, the worksheet name becomes the table name in the Design Integrations task pane. As a side note, if you have multiple worksheets as part of a workbook, each worksheet becomes an available table to use for that spreadsheet data source. See screenshot below:

ALL row and column values must be exactly that, values. There cannot be any formulas or summed totals on the spreadsheet

Import your Spreadsheet data source through the easy-to-use Actions Pane link named “Import Spreadsheet.”

Follow the automated prompting.

Ensure your workbook was uploaded by viewing it in the Data Sources data pane.

Open your Data Source and locate your table from the Data Components Pane.

Drag your table into the Staging area to review and query the data.

That’s all it takes to import an Excel Workbook as an Excel Spreadsheet Data Source. Be on the lookout for more Workday Adaptive Data Integration tips and tricks from me in the future!

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Metadata Loaders

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

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

Learn More about Workday Adaptive Planning:

Workday Adaptive Planning Framework: ASC 606 Revenue Recognition

Learn More about Workday Adaptive Planning:

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

Learn more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

The Cost of Spreadsheet Errors

Famous Spreadsheet Errors

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

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

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

To set up the credential you will need to do the following:

To set up the data source, you will need to do the following:

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

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

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

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

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

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Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Learn More about Workday Adaptive Planning:

Learn More about Workday Adaptive Planning:

Learn more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Famous Spreadsheet Errors

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

To set up the credential you will need to do the following:

To set up the data source, you will need to do the following:

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

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