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Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks

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

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The capital summary sheet provides a snapshot of an organization’s capital assets and their depreciation with an overview of CapEx by asset type and level. This sheet allows the user to see the total depreciation, which is broken down by new depreciation and existing depreciation, as well as fixed assets. 

New Depreciation gives us the monthly depreciation of all the new budgeted assets for the new budget period by month. This comes from the Capital sheet via a linked account to carry dimensionality.

Existing Depreciation covers assets that were acquired prior to the current planning version and are actively depreciating. This information can be taken from a depreciation schedule directly from the ERP system or imported into a separate supporting schedule within Workday Adaptive Planning.

Fixed Assets are the new assets that are purchased in the given period and the purchase value that will be capitalized and depreciated. This also comes from the Capital sheet via a linked account to carry dimensionality.


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: How to Filter Data for Sage Intacct Integrations within Adaptive Staging Tables

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Matrix Report “Save” vs “Save As” Options

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Automating Workflows and Approval Processes

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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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Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Using Display Fields in Modeled Sheets

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Modeled sheets in Workday Adaptive Planning often have no monthly data that displays on the sheet. To see the monthly calculations you must go to row details and create a report or create a separate sheet (standard or cube). However, you can see the calculated amounts in the sheet display by using the Display Column feature.

In this demo data, we see a typical Personnel modeled sheet. Notice there are no months. None of the calculated accounts such as Salary, FICA and Bonus are shown in a monthly display.

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However, the Salary column is shown and is the Salary that was loaded. Assume this file was loaded in January 2023 and now it is August 2023. We can go to the columns definition of the modeled sheet editor and select Display Columns:

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Which displays all the calculated accounts in a selection:

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Bring over Personnel Salary and we see the following options:

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Leaving the default options, we refresh the modeled sheet display to see a new field, Personnel Salary:

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Personnel Salary is showing the monthly salary cost. Notice for those making $120,000, the new field is displaying $10,000 for the monthly salary. We can change the parameter, “Number of time periods in Rollup Range” from 1 to 12 as shown:

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And the result is the monthly salary is now displaying the annual salary:

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To see how the different parameters affect the display consider the following scenarios.

  1. 1. Display 1 Year before Reference Time Period
  2. 2. Display Year Containing Reference Time Period
  3. 3. Display 1 year after Reference Time Period

To see the current time period, set the parameter and see the result:

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To see the 1 year later time period, set the parameter:

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Note: the Start of plan is Jul 2023. So, Year After Reference Time Period is Jan – Dec of 2024.

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Here, we can see that the salaries have increased by 3% which is the annual raise percentage. By switching from 1 month to 12 we get:

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These numbers represent the calendar year (Jan – Dec) after the reference period.

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. We help businesses achieve their full potential with Workday Adaptive Planning by combining the software with our best practices and expert guidance.

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Restrictions on Cube Sheets

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Metadata Loaders

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

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Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Metadata Loaders

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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.

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

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

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Adaptive Displays – Sheets 

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

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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

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Workday Adaptive Planning Framework: ASC 606 Revenue Recognition

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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. 

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:

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

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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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The Cost of Spreadsheet Errors

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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. 

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

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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!

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

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

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

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

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