Workday Adaptive Planning

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.

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

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!

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

August 19, 2022 by Revelwood

More than half of professional services firms can’t forecast project revenue beyond six months. Workday’s Mark David and Justin Joseph share insights into how organizations can get revenue forecasting right, even when business is anything but usual.

What is it about revenue forecasting that can be so challenging? For people-based industries such as professional services, their project revenue is based on talent supply. And people—including all 109 billion of them who have ever lived on Earth—can be difficult to predict.

“People are highly variable,” said Justin Joseph, senior director of product strategy at Workday. “They aren’t always available. They go on vacation. And, as we’ve experienced the past few years, people leave, and there can be skills shortages. So there’s a lot of variability in how professional services companies generate project revenue.”

Beyond the variability of their employees and the impact of unprecedented trends and events, professional services firms also deal with different systems in different parts of the organization. These silos can cause data to be inconsistent and inaccurate—challenges that only get worse as an organization grows.

“The larger an organization, the more complex things get,” said Mark David, vice president of solution management at Workday. “Organizations then become more reliant on processes to manage projects and people, but that requires accurate data from disparate places.”

In this episode of the Workday Podcast, we’re 100% focused on revenue forecasting for professional services, with guests Joseph and David. They share trends impacting firms, the pros and cons of different types of forecasting, and how firms can start to solve their challenges to better plan and forecast.

Here are a few highlights of our conversation, edited for clarity. Be sure to follow us wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts, and remember you can find our entire podcast catalog here.

“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. And all those different systems mean that you have data that’s going to be wildly inconsistent. You’ll need a lot of integrations to pull this data together to make sure that you have an end-to-end process for revenue forecasting.” —Justin Joseph
“A year ago, a customer who runs a 5,000-employee professional services firm told me the one thing he needed was a good revenue forecast more than anything else right now. As you can imagine, this was especially needed with what’s happened over the last few years, which have made forecasting where your business is going even more difficult.” —Mark David
“With unexpected scenarios, you’re following the exact same processes as expected scenarios, but you have to forecast at a much faster pace and much more frequently because your assumptions are changing so rapidly, maybe hour by hour or day by day. How quickly can you pull this data together and then model it and share it out? It may sound contradictory, but they’re similar. Speed is ultimately what’s different.” —Justin Joseph

This blog post was originally published on the Workday Adaptive Planning blog.

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 Revelwood 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: Loan Amortization

July 6, 2022 by Robert Nordhagen Leave a Comment

Loan amortization schedules in Workday Adaptive Planning are slightly different than those done in Excel.

In Excel the typical amortization schedule looks like this:

In Workday Adaptive Planning most versions only go 1-5 years into the future. Creating a complete 10-25 year amortization schedule is not the best practice. Here is an example of an Amortization Schedule in Adaptive:

In Adaptive we show inputs in rows 2-8. Rows 10 through 14 are the formulas that calculate the interest per period, the principle and the declining principal balance.

Row 2: Input the initial loan balance for every month the loan will be active. If you are keying it in, as opposed to uploading a file from Excel, you can use Copy Forward rather than key it in every month.

Row 3: Input Balance (if acquiring the loan). Instead of the initial balance, put the balance as of assumption date.

Row 4: Principal Payment. This is used for variable rate loans

Row 5: The months will be the same just like the Initial Balance for every month that the loan is active.

Row 6: Amort Month is a counter that increases by 1 each month until the loan matures, then the field should go blank. In most cases the version will max out before the loan matures.

Row 7: Interest Rate %. This will be the same every month for fixed rate loans. For variable rate, forecast the expected rate by month.

Row 8: Draw Down. This is for additional payments.

The formula rows will calculate as follows:

Row 10: Beginning balance is equal to prior month ending balance.

Row 11: Total Payment. This is the most complicated formula and takes many scenarios into account using nested ifs. The basis of the formula is the payment formula; ie, Balance x i / ( (1+i) * (1- 1/( 1+I )^n ))

Row 12: Interest Payment. This takes the Beginning Balance * the Interest rate (monthly rate: rate/12)

Row 13: Principal Payment. This takes Total Payment – Interest Payment

Row 14: Ending Balance. This takes the Beginning Balance – Principal Payment – Draw Down

Follow up to Amortization is Conversion to Straight Line

Previously, we showed how to do a loan amortization in Adaptive Planning. Now we will go to the next step: Straight-line the interest according to GAAP in certain situations. Below is a loan amortization that takes the loan payments to maturity. The interest payments are summed. That sum is then divided evenly among the payments and the amortization schedule is redone with constant interest every month as shown in the second schedule.

This is tricky in Adaptive Planning because a typical Excel schedule is run out to term since there are almost always sufficient columns in an Excel sheet to handle all the monthly payments. However, in Adaptive Planning, a typical version will be only 3 to 5 years into the future so only loans within 60 months of maturity could follow the same pattern.

For any longer maturities we have to apply the following logic. For loans with a constant monthly payment (which is most loans), calculate the payment. Then multiply the payment by the number of payments such as $9541.10 * 120 months, which is equal to $1,144,932.00 (slightly different by $0.37 due to rounding). Subtract the initial balance $1,144,932 – $1,000,000 = $144,932 which is the total of the interest. Now the Interest Payment will be equal to the total interest divided by the number of payments as seen below.

Now the GL account for Interest Expense can be linked to SL_Interest_Pmt and the GAAP reporting of Straight Line interest will be in the P&L.

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Choose the Correct TIME Syntax

June 22, 2022 by Michelle Song Leave a Comment

Are you familiar with all the TIME syntax in Workday Adaptive Planning? Do you know what is the best practice for each of them? This blog post will tell you the difference between them.

Below are the most common TIME syntax in Adaptive Planning.

Month(this)
Versionmonth(this) – returns the
This.year.positionof(this.month)
This.version.positionof(this.month)

In the following example, this instance has a custom calendar which is from July – June. The example is created using Month as the stratum. The same logics are applied to Quarter and Year.

Graphical user interface, application, table

Description automatically generated

In July 2021, Month(this) returns the month in the standard calendar, which is month 7. This syntax also assumes that July is from July 1^st to July 31^st. For example, if 7/30/2021 in a custom calendar is actually a date in Aug 2021, then versionmonth(July-2021) and versionmonth(Aug-2021) will return the same number. This same situation also applies to Versionmonth(this).

Versionmonth(this) returns the month of the version, which also follows the standard calendar and assumes July is from July 1^st to July 31^st.

Graphical user interface, table

Description automatically generated

This.year.positionof(this.month) returns the fiscal month of the year, which is month 1 for July-2021. This syntax references the custom calendar. For example, if 7/30/2021 in a custom calendar is actually a date in Aug 2021, then This.year.positionof(this.month) returns month 2 in the year, which is Aug 2021. Same situation applies to This.version.positionof(this.month).

Graphical user interface, text, application

Description automatically generated

This.version.positionof(this.month) returns the month in the version since the Start of Version. In this case, the Start of Version is July 2021, therefore it is month 1 in the version.

Other use cases and helpful formulas related to time.

Personnel Sheet:

For Headcount calculation that has a Custom Calendar and Start Date before the system date
- this.Year.positionof(this.Month) – correct result, but shown as RED (error) on Income Statement because the date is outside of the system date.
- versionmonth(this) – might result in incorrect result due to date overlaps in two months.
- Use iff(ROW.PartialHeadcount>0, 1,0) as a workaround.
Cumulative Salary
- Standard calendar:

iff(month(this)>1, ROW.Salary+ROW.CumulativeSalary[time=this-1], ROW.Salary)

Customized calendar:

iff(this.Year.positionof(this.Month)>1,ROW.Salary+ROW.CumulativeSalary[time=this-1], ROW.Salary)

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:

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

Read more FP&A Done Right posts:

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:

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Loan Amortization

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Choose the Correct TIME Syntax

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Revelwood Overview

EXPERTISE

ABOUT

CONNECT

Workday Adaptive Planning

Learn more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Famous Spreadsheet Errors

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Read more FP&A Done Right posts:

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:

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Footer

Revelwood Overview

EXPERTISE

ABOUT

CONNECT