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Unlocking Success: Harnessing Customer Satisfaction Metrics with Workday Adaptive Planning

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In today’s competitive business landscape, customer satisfaction is more critical than ever. Happy customers are not only likely to stay loyal but also become advocates for your brand, driving growth through referrals and repeat business. In this blog post, we will explore how Workday Adaptive Planning can help monitor customer satisfaction metrics and leverage the data for strategic decision-making, with a particular focus on the professional services industry.

The Importance of Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is the backbone of any successful business, but it holds even more significance in the professional services sector. Here’s why:

1. Client Retention:

High customer satisfaction translates into strong client retention rates. Satisfied clients are more likely to continue using your services, providing a stable revenue stream.

2. Reliable Referrals:

Happy customers become your brand advocates. They are more inclined to recommend your services to others, leading to a steady influx of new clients through referrals.

3. Competitive Advantage:

Exceptional customer satisfaction sets you apart from your competitors. It’s a key differentiator that can make potential clients choose your services over others.

Leveraging Workday Adaptive Planning

Workday Adaptive Planning offers a powerful solution for tracking and utilizing customer satisfaction metrics. Here’s how it can help:

1. Integration with Customer Feedback Software:

Workday Adaptive Planning seamlessly integrates with customer feedback software like Zendesk or Monday. You can easily import customer satisfaction data into the platform, ensuring that teams across your organization have access to valuable insights.

2. Comprehensive Dashboard:

The platform provides an active dashboard displaying essential metrics such as average SLA, Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and customer satisfaction. It also breaks down renewal rates by team leads. Conditional formatting helps identify areas where improvements can be made.

3. Drill-Down Capabilities:

With Workday Adaptive Planning, you can drill down into the data further. For example, you can explore specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), such as new references. This feature allows for in-depth analysis and customized reporting.

4. Informed Decision-Making:

By leveraging the data from customer satisfaction metrics, businesses can make informed decisions. Whether it’s retaining clients, generating references, or delivering projects on time, the platform offers insights to enhance efficiency and effectiveness.

5. Industry-Specific Metrics:

Workday Adaptive Planning doesn’t just stop at basic metrics. It can provide additional details on industry-specific metrics, giving you a more comprehensive view of your performance within your sector.

Conclusion

In a world where customer satisfaction reigns supreme, Workday Adaptive Planning empowers businesses, especially those in the professional services industry, to turn data into actionable insights. By monitoring and analyzing customer satisfaction metrics, you can maintain your current customer base and drive business growth.

If you’re interested in diving deeper into other Adaptive use cases for professional services or want to explore how Workday Adaptive Planning can transform your organization, we encourage you to contact Revelwood today. Success begins with understanding and optimizing customer satisfaction, and with the right tools, you can unlock a world of opportunities for your business.

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Aged to Perfection: The Whiskey Model for Workday Adaptive Planning

Reusable Cash Flow Forecasting in the Solar Installation Industry

What-if Analysis in Workday Adaptive Planning

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The Power of the Growth Mindset: How CFOs Drive Success in Finance

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This is an excerpt from a blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning. In It, A McKinsey & Company senior partner lays out five elements that help drive performance, and finance leaders from Adobe, e.l.f. Beauty, and TD Bank share their individual approaches to growth, in a Fortune virtual event.

For CFOs, a growth mindset means the ability to help their companies thrive by firing on multiple cylinders.

That’s according to Ishaan Seth, a senior partner and co-lead of global banking and securities practice at McKinsey & Company, who outlined a three-pronged approach that includes customer acquisition and retention, innovation, and building new businesses.

“The mindset that personifies the best growth leaders, be they CFOs or CEOs, are those who can help the company operate across all three of those areas at once,” Seth said in a Fortune webinar sponsored by Workday. “That’s the essence of the growth mindset.”

Developed by Stanford University psychology professor Carol Dweck, the concept of a “growth mindset” was based on research that found people enjoyed greater success when they believed their talents could be developed “through hard work, good strategies, and input from others.” The research also found effects for organizations: “When entire companies embrace a growth mindset, their employees report feeling far more empowered and committed; they also receive greater organizational support for collaboration and innovation,” Dweck wrote.

In practice, a growth mindset can be seen in the C-suite of successful organizations. Seth said McKinsey surveyed 2,500 public companies over the past two decades and found five variables that drive outperformance in relation to their peers.

  1. 1. Resource allocation. “How dynamically or fluidly are you reallocating resources to newer businesses and opportunities?” Seth said.
  2. 2. Mergers and acquisitions. “M&A and a constant portfolio pruning both on acquisition but equally on divestiture” is critical, Seth said. “Are you regenerating the base?”
  3. 3. Productivity and efficiency. Outpacing peers is important.
  4. 4. Technology and technology innovation. “It’s a space where the arms race to keep current has in many cases across industries outstripped the ability for companies to invest at the level to be on the leading edge,” Seth said.
  5. 5. Margin expansion. This is accomplished by refreshing the value proposition, he added.

When it comes to technology, finance leaders are uniquely positioned to drive innovation at scale by making the right investments and establishing the pace necessary to more quickly benefit from that technology—whether it’s artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), or generative AI.

Seth cited a McKinsey study that found generative AI could potentially add $2.6-$4.4 trillion per year to the global economy, noting that the United Kingdom’s entire GDP in 2021 was $3.1 trillion.

Finance leaders, then, must understand how to invest intelligently in technology and help set the pace at which to do so. 

“Is there a competitive advantage in getting to a higher-quality capability around whatever the technology may be 12 or 20 months sooner than your competitors?” Seth said. “The CFO can play an outsized role in driving speed as a source of competitive advantage.”

Seth added that calculating the return on investment (ROI) on technology spending might well require organizations to rethink their key performance indicators (KPIs), with CFOs driving the conversation around growth metrics.

The CFO, he said, owns the value creation story of a company. “We see the role of the CFO as being able to describe what it would take to double the market cap of the company in five years.”

Creating an Atmosphere of Innovation

To Mandy Fields, senior vice president and CFO at e.l.f. Beauty, leadership means promoting an organizational growth mindset by creating an environment that fosters innovation. 

“It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks, but it’s the manager’s job to make sure it’s safe for others to take them,” she said, attributing that ideal to the company’s 17 consecutive quarters of net sales growth—with a fourth quarter that saw sales growth of nearly 80%. “A lot of that has been not being afraid to take risks.”

As an example, Fields said e.l.f. Beauty in 2019 decided to invest in growing their presence on social media video platform TikTok, a move that resulted in “amazing” engagement. “As we went into the pandemic in 2020, when everybody was rushing in to figure out how to get on this platform, how to engage with the consumer, we were already there.”

Fields said the company holds annual off-site meetings to align its people to its priorities. “It helps us think about how we set an annual budget, but it really is an opportunity for inspiration, imagination, and possibility to converge,” she added. “That’s motivating for the team—not just for finance but for the entire company—to know that even though we’ve experienced this tremendous growth, there’s still so much more ahead of us.”

‘Be Constructively Unreasonable’

For enterprise software company Adobe, innovation is part of its DNA, according to Dan Durn, CFO and executive vice president, finance, technology services and operations. 

“We are consistently reinventing the company and engaging with customers in a way that’s very relevant for them,” he said. “Status quo is not a business strategy.”

Durn said understanding Adobe’s products “with granularity” helps the company innovate in order to serve customers better, making its growth and market position sustainable for the long run. He added that there’s “a velocity within the company” and clarity about innovation, as well as how to achieve growth via acquisitions. 

“We’re going to primarily be an organic, innovation-driven company,” Durn said. “But we will complement from time to time, and you can see that speed play out not only in our decision-making but the way we want to enable customers as well.”

The concept of a growth mindset—and continuous learning—is critical within a technology company, Durn said, offering a guiding leadership principle: “Be constructively unreasonable, which is that sweet spot of stretching people to more than they thought was possible and getting them to lean into problems and deliver more than they thought was possible.”

Growth on Personal and Organizational Levels

The variability in the macro environment, along with competition for customers in the retail banking space, keeps TD Bank CFO Xihao Hu focused on innovation on the customer-facing side as well as the back end. 

“We are working on enhancing our strategies to make sure we not only defend our turf but can continue to speed up our customer acquisitions, bring new customers in, and retain the loyal customer,” he said, adding that the bank had recently launched two new, unique credit card products and is looking at expanding its commercial banking into new geographies.

TD Bank’s growth mindset, Hu said, shows up on organizational and personal levels. “Once we had the strategy set, we embarked on a journey to tell the story across TD Bank in the U.S.,” he added, sharing in detail the bank’s plans with leaders who would then “take those stories back to their teams to cascade that sense of a mindset of growth.”

Hu also described a three-year blueprint for finance employees to improve their storytelling abilities to help TD Bank’s business partners grow. “We want to shift from a traditional role of overseers of past transactions into strategic partners to our finance employees,” he said.

Watch the full Fortune webcast “Emerging CFO: Maintaining a Growth Mindset in Turbulent Times.”

Read the full blog post on the Workday blog.

More from our FP&A Done Right Series:

Navigating the BPM Vendor Landscape: Key Insights from the 2023-2024 Report

Navigating Economic Volatility: Insights from CFOs

Workday Adaptive Planning Recognized with the 2023 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Financial Planning Software

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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 Recognized with the 2023 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Financial Planning Software

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One of the solutions in our best-of-breed portfolio of software for the Office of Finance, Workday Adaptive Planning, has been recognized by the 2023 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Financial Planning Software. Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice distinctions recognize vendors and products that are highly rated by their customers. 

This is based on reviews and ratings from 84 leaders in the Office of Finance who rely on Workday Adaptive Planning for strategic business insight. The software has an overall rating of 4.8 out of 5 with 97% of users giving Workday Adaptive Planning 4 or 5 stars.

In just four short years, we’ve helped many clients transform their finance functions through using Workday Adaptive Planning. Here’s what some of Revelwood’s clients have to say about Workday Adaptive Planning:

“Workday Adaptive Planning allows me to step back and let the CFO do more with the data. With Excel, our CFO had to come back to me with questions and comments. Now she can make the changes she needs to directly in Workday Adaptive Planning. It is very powerful for her to do scenario planning in the model herself.” – Kris Gilbert, Controller, Nautel. 

“Workday Adaptive Planning is a very intuitive and flexible solution. Revelwood was very creative in how they implemented Workday Adaptive Planning for Texans Credit Union. We had weekly meetings with Revelwood where they would share their knowledge and even go through technical details with us.” – Ben Hart, CFO, Texans Credit Union

“[With Workday Adaptive Planning] We’ve changed the finance team’s value proposition. Our activities are no longer about building the reports, they are about analyzing the data.” – Ryan Garceau, head of operations and finance, Invaio Sciences. 

Workday Adaptive Planning is used by more than 6,000 customers in all industries across the globe.

More from our FP&A Done Right Series:

No, Artificial Intelligence Will Not Replace Finance Jobs

Annual Planning Versus Continuous Planning

Professional Services Firms Need Future-Ready Forecasting

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No, Artificial Intelligence Will Not Replace Finance Jobs

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This is an excerpt from a blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning. It is a recent discussion between Workday’s Terrance Wampler and Stanford Professor Erik Brynjolfsson, explaining why CFOs are well-positioned to lead the AI revolution using a human-centered approach to artificial intelligence.

Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, has some advice for finance professionals concerned about whether artificial intelligence (AI) will replace their jobs: “AI is not going to replace CFOs. It is going to replace CFOs who don’t use AI with those who do.”

I [Terrance Wampler] had a great discussion with Professor Brynjolfsson recently at the Workday Future of Intelligent Finance Tour in San Francisco. The event—hosted in partnership with American Institute of Certified Public Accountants-Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (AICPA-CIMA) and Accenture—was designed to help finance and IT professionals leverage AI, machine learning (ML), and other advanced technologies to accelerate their journey to becoming finance futurists.

Brynjolfsson, who also serves as a senior fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI, gave attendees a crash course on how AI will reshape the future of finance as we know it. Having just come from a visit to Washington, D.C., to brief the White House and the Council of Economic Advisors on the impact of AI, Brynjolfsson has a front-row seat to the potential for AI to change workforce dynamics. 

“In the early stages of AI, we knew that low-skilled labor would be impacted,” he told me. “As the technology has progressed, we’re seeing that professional workers—CFOs, accountants, lawyers, doctors—are going to be very much affected. Affected doesn’t mean automated. It doesn’t mean replaced. Rather, AI is going to augment your abilities and give you the freedom to do new things.” 

I couldn’t agree more with that positive assessment, which is why we’re investing so heavily in generative AI as the innovation engine for Workday Enterprise Management Cloud. As the group general manager for Workday’s suite of solutions for the office of the CFO, I see generative AI as an enabler of finance’s dual role as value protector and value creator.

Value protection tasks such as internal audit, risk management, and regulatory compliance can benefit from AI’s ability to comb through vast amounts of data to detect and surface anomalies before they destroy a company’s value or market reputation. Large language models (LLMs) can be trained to stay updated on the latest financial regulations, ensuring that compliance is always up to date. They can also assist in risk management by identifying patterns in data that might signify potential risks and by building robust risk models that consider a wide array of factors.

AI can also help drive value creation, whether that’s automating routine tasks to drive cost savings or enabling top-line growth. LLMs, for example, can help predict customer behavior, create more accurate forecasts, and improve scenario modeling by processing a large volume of data and considering a multitude of variables. Augmenting the capabilities of financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams would allow them to prepare for a wider range of potential outcomes, making planning more resilient and adaptable to changing market conditions. 

Thanks to productivity gains like these, Brynjolfsson predicts that generative AI will be bigger than any of the technologies we’ve used over the last 10 years. He provided an example from new research he led on how generative AI is boosting call center productivity. 

“A couple of years ago, we teamed up with a company and a couple of Stanford professors and graduates to start a company that helps call centers do a better job,” he said. “And what we found was that the operators who used the AI model were dramatically more productive and more successful than the ones who didn’t, with the least skilled operators 35% more productive.” 

Brynjolfsson went on to explain that the model learned from the most successful operators, listening in on their conversations and identifying phrases or suggestions that improved customer sentiment. The model then passed on those skills to the newest operators. “That’s the kind of tacit knowledge that was previously really hard to automate.”

Generative AI and the CFO Role

Gartner analysts recently noted that CFOs are best positioned to help lead the implementation of generative AI in corporations because they have more insight into opportunities to leverage the technology to reduce costs, improve productivity, and increase revenue streams. “The CFO should be on the frontier of the AI revolution,” Brynjolfsson said. “CFOs understand how to work with unstructured and structured data and do sophisticated analyses on that data, which is why they can make such a big impact.” 

Brynjolfsson also sees human resources teams benefiting. “I did an estimate a few years ago and found that the value of human capital in the U.S. economy is a little over $200 trillion—10 times the value of the gross domestic product (GDP). But the problem with human capital is it’s very poorly measured and understood,” he said. “There are a lot of soft intangibles in there. AI’s large language models can do a lot to capture and understand the value of your human capital.” 

Given AI’s power to disrupt the economy, I asked Brynjolfsson about his take on the mood in Washington around regulating AI.

“I came away from my trip really impressed with how up to speed the government officials I met with were on generative AI,” he noted. “They understand that there’s a tidal wave coming that will be bigger than the impact of the pandemic on remote work, and they are taking it very seriously.” 

Brynjolfsson closed out our chat on a positive note, predicting that AI could potentially double the productivity rate currently estimated by the Congressional Budget Office over the next decade. He also sees AI giving us more resources to address challenges we face on the healthcare front, such as cancer, and on the educational front, such as personalized education. The reason is AI’s ability to unlock human potential versus just seeing it as cost-saving automation. 

“Any one of you who has tried to call an automated voice response system knows it can be very frustrating, especially when there’s a long tail of questions that we ask that aren’t common,” he said. “We humans are much better at dealing with exceptions than machines, so a good partnership is where AI can answer common questions and humans can deal with exceptions. AI has a much higher upside in terms of creating additional value than simply trying to take costs out.” 


Read the full blog post on the Workday blog.

More from our FP&A Done Right Series:

Professional Services Firms Need Future-Ready Forecasting

Enterprise Planning Helps Professional Services Firms Adapt to Changes

FP&A Done Right: Trends in Accounting and Finance

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Professional Services Firms Need Future-Ready Forecasting

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This is an excerpt from a blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning. It highlights some approaches for professional services firms to keep up with the breakneck pace of work.

Professional services firms don’t have the luxury of gradually adjusting to an evolving digital environment. For them, the digital future is pretty much here. More than one-third of professional services firms expect that at least 75% of their revenue will come from digital by 2025, according to a report by PwC and Workday.

As an additional sign of the changing times, a growing proportion of firms are investing more than $50 million in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and advanced analytics, according to the report. And with recent advances in generative AI, investments are likely to continue to grow. That’s further blurring the line between professional services and digital services—a distinction that will only get fuzzier in the future. 

“Digital first is our new reality. That isn’t going to change,” shared Joe Golden, vice president of services, IBM, at a Workday event.

Yet, despite how adroitly many professional services firms adapted to wide-scale changes brought on by the pandemic, some lack visibility around past behavior and likely future outcomes. “Professional services organizations can be surprisingly opaque when it comes to insight,” IDC reports.

To succeed, firms must solve their data, talent, and technology challenges. But many have yet to embrace this new reality. Among professional services leaders, 57% say there’s a growing gap between where their business is and where it needs to be to compete, according to a recent Workday study on digital transformation. And only 23% say their digital strategy allows them to keep pace with or exceed the demands of the business.

Firms will need to bolster their access to high-quality, always-available data, along with having staff with the necessary data literacy skills to make sense of it all. Of companies with fully-accessible data, 76% say they are well-equipped digitally to ensure business continuity in times of crisis, Workday finds. Small wonder, then, that advanced analytics and data visualization are the skills most sought after by IT leaders (35%) and finance leaders (34%).

“Access to data is the crux of most technology issues in any company,” says Jennifer LaClair, CFO, Ally Financial.

To better understand what the future might hold for professional services firms, industry thought leaders shared their predictions for three of the biggest trends the industry will face. The following excerpt focuses on how professional services firms can benefit from more sophisticated forecasting.

Data Silos Disappear as Organizations Race to Future-Ready Forecasting and Adaptability

To drive productivity and profit and to forecast accurately, future-forward professional services firms will need more integration and less separation of their people and systems. “Today’s professional services organizations simply cannot operate with functional silos as the lines between sales, delivery, and finance become blurred,” SPI asserts.

Unfortunately, these organizations’ data too often sits trapped within silos. “The reason most companies can’t forecast their revenue more accurately is because they have different systems and data across their lines of businesses and services,” Joseph says. “And all those different systems mean that you have data that’s going to be wildly inconsistent.”

Almost half (49%) of business leaders—and almost two-thirds (62%) of professional services leaders—say their inability to connect operational, people, and financial data to business outcomes impairs the organization’s agility, according to a Workday survey of senior business executives. 

But firms with accessible data tell a different story, the Workday survey reveals. A towering 85% of leaders whose companies enjoy fully accessible data say the organization can embrace change readily. All of which points to the urgent need to overcome siloed data sources.

For ERPA, a consulting and enterprise application managed services firm, adopting professional services automation slashed the time needed to calculate revenue from a full day to just 15 minutes. And the firm gained a stronger forecasting ability in the process. 

“From week to week, we’re able to get a really good sense of our forecasted revenue for projects in the next four to 12 weeks,” says Jon Milkovich, director of Workday financials at ERPA. “So it’s really provided a lot better real-time insight into what our forecasted revenue will be.”

That’s a need that best-in-class firms are meeting head-on. They’re 82% more likely than other firms to be able to share financial and operational data with the extended enterprise through a central repository, Aberdeen finds in its report: “Leverage Demand Planning and Forecasting for Best-in-Class Performance During Volatile Times.”

Learn more about how professional services firms can adapt and change in our recent webinar, Streamlining Professional Business Services with Workday Adaptive Planning.

Read the full blog post on the Workday blog.

More from our FP&A Done Right Series:

Enterprise Planning Helps Professional Services Firms Adapt to Changes

FP&A Done Right: Trends in Accounting and Finance

Leveraging IBM Planning Analytics for xP&A

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Enterprise Planning Helps Professional Services Firms Adapt to Changes

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Professional services firms make money based on the number of hours they service clients. These companies need to have many consultants with desirable skills as billable as possible. They also have to have enough resources available to start new projects as soon as the contracts are signed. In short, professional services firms need to make the best use of the people they have, understand the needs they will have in the future and then appropriately plan for changes in a dynamic market with a history of being a “lumpy” business.

This can present a big challenge. In fact, according to Workday, “Only 29% of professional services leaders say they are confident in their organization’s current financial and business plans.”

This is where enterprise planning can help. With enterprise planning, professional services firms can easily perform demand planning, which can then integrate with project revenue planning, financial forecasting and reporting. These models use the same data and provide the firm with consistent and accurate information. 

Enterprise planning is a key resource for these firms. Professional services companies can perform ad-hoc analysis, asking questions of the data, such as:

  • How many consultants are available/currently “sitting on the bench,” not earning revenue?
  • What skill sets do our current consultants have and what skills are missing?
  • Which new projects are best served by onshore staffing and which new projects are best served by offshore staffing?
  • Do we have enough staff to take on this new project?
  • If a project ends unexpectedly, what existing projects can use those resources?
  • Are we optimizing our people in the most profitable way?

Learn why more and more professional services firms are embracing enterprise planning. Watch our latest webinar on Streamlining Professional Business Services with Workday Adaptive Planning here.

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

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This week’s Workday Adaptive Planning tip pertains to the manual process of reordering Cube accounts to enable a desired hierarchy of accounts. While an Account Attribute could be tagged onto the accounts as an alternate hierarchy structure, a full restructuring of the main Accounts is often required.

In the following screen capture the Summary/Top level cube account has 9 children accounts t1-t9:

The client requested that two summary levels be added below the Test Account: A1 which will house t1, t2 and t9 and A2 which will house t3-t8.

The summary accounts will also require a “Total.” Therefore, they will be developed as standard accounts. As they are added to the Test Account, they are placed automatically at the bottom of the set of current children accounts as follows:

The following screen capture displays the result of attempting to drag the t1 account into and below the A1 account- it is not successful as the A1 new account is a child and can’t accept a child. It ends up simply “moving” below the A1 account and still rolling up to the Test account.

To enable the t1 to be added into the summary A1 account, a temporary “dummy” account is required to be developed and placed into the A1 account, thus activating it as a parent/summary account. The following warning message is displayed to confirm that the A1 account is being transformed into a summary account by the add-account action.

The temporary child account can be named anything as it will be deleted once the transformed A1 parent account is activated and a valid child is moved under it.

After saving the temporary account, the set of accounts now show the A1 as a parent/summary account with temp1 rolling into it.

Upon selecting and “dragging” the t1 account into the A1 parent account the following confirmation warning is displayed:

Confirming by checking the “move account box” and saving, results in the t1 account rolling into the A1 account.

As A1 is “activated”, the temp1 account can now be deleted with following warning displayed before clicking on the “ Yes” button to complete the deletion.

The result of the process in the following screen capture shows the t1 account as the current sole child of the A1 parent account:

The next step in the process is to drag/move t2 and t9 to roll up into A1. Dragging t2 into the A1 summary places it above the t2 child. This requires reordering the accounts by moving down the t2 account below t2 for proper account display in reports and the sheet itself.

This process takes extra time and can be avoided by selecting t9 (the third account of A1 to be moved) first, and then t2 and t1 in sequence. With only three accounts to move this is a quick process. However, with many accounts it can take a lot longer, and sequencing can easily be developed incorrectly. The import account option can also be utilized after the “dummy” account is manually created under A1.

The final screen capture displays midway thought loading the A2 parent account– starting with t8 and then moving t7 into A2 thus starting with correct account sequencing and not requiring reordering as occurred in the A1 development process. Next, the accounts t6-t3 can be added to A2 in that order.

In summary, reordering, changing, and restructuring the main account structure of Cube and Model accounts can be handled with the “special” temporary “dummy” (not so dumb after all!) account created as a child below the account turning into a parent. This “activates” the parent account enabling the children to move into the newly developed parent accounts (last to first to not require subsequent reordering of all the accounts.) This process also works when working with GL Accounts- setting up parent accounts and adding them to Root Accounts. An earlier Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks article I authored describes Root Accounts and their function in the application.

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.

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Adaptive Displays – Sheets 

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

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

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Revelwood Expands Best-in-Class Solution Portfolio to Include Incorta

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We’re expanding our best-in-class solution portfolio to include Incorta’s open data delivery platform, giving our clients an analytics hub for the Office of Finance. Incorta’s technology simplifies the data ingestion and delivery approach, giving clients unrivaled data access to deliver fast, accurate insights.

“Savvy financial management can be hard to achieve,” said Tom McCrory, senior vice president, sales, Incorta. “It requires a rock-solid foundation of comprehensive data and ad-hoc, self-service analytics. Together, Revelwood and Incorta will help our join clients in the Office of Finance take the next step in providing strategic guidance to business operations.”

Incorta was recently included in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence (ABI) platforms. It was one of 20 vendors assessed in the report. Incorta directly maps to data sources, eliminating the need for data transformation, reshaping and aggregation required by other platforms.

“The Office of Finance has become a strategic asset for industry-leading organizations,” said Robert Gordy, CTO, Revelwood. “It’s no longer about managing the budget or performing basic accounting activities. Instead, the Office of Finance has evolved into managing all the disparate pieces of data to provide forward-thinking insights for the business. We’re partnering with Incorta to help CFOs and their teams move toward unlimited, active analysis.”

Additionally, Incorta has existing integrations with two of Revelwood’s technology partners – BlackLine and Workday Adaptive Planning.

Incorta and BlackLine

Incorta’s integration with BlackLine enables accounting teams to instantly drill-through to transaction details with a single click. It provides users the ability to access data from multiple ERPs and other source systems with easy, instant access to transaction-level details down to the subledger. By using BlackLine and Incorta together, clients benefit from:

  • A single source for all data
  • Transaction-level detail
  • Streamlined data flows

Incorta and Workday Adaptive Planning

Incorta’s integration with Workday Adaptive Planning accelerates and improves forecasting and planning with access to near real-time transaction-level data. The integration enables:

  • Automating operational analytics
  • Delivering transaction-level detail
  • Unifying enterprise data
  • Streamlining data flows


Learn more about our new partnership with Incorta!

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