Workday Adaptive Planning

FP&A Done Right: 3 Steps for Selecting your KPIs

May 7, 2021 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

This is a guest blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning, explaining how to identify the most appropriate KPIs for your organization.

Now more than ever, companies that are unable to adapt or pivot easily to adjust to changing market conditions don’t just risk falling behind. They risk their very future.

But business agility isn’t something you can implement overnight. It takes a modern, multifaceted planning environment—one that isn’t weighed down by static, legacy planning processes characterized by spreadsheets, siloed data, outdated annual plans, and stale historical snapshots.

Today, forward-thinking CFOs and their FP&A teams understand the need for nimble, data-driven financial modeling powered by cross-departmental collaboration and encompassing a panoramic view of the business—one where planning happened not just within finance but throughout the enterprise. This is the definition of modern approach to planning.

And it’s exactly what businesses need right now.

In a recent blog, we outlined the three key steps that help you lay the groundwork for a modern planning model within your own organization. To realize the full potential of that groundwork, you’ll also want to engage a series of key initiatives that will amplify your ROI and increase the velocity of business transformation. Here we look at the first of these: identifying your critical KPIs.

When everything is important, nothing is important

When everything is deemed critical, how can you be expected to prioritize? It’s impossible to effectively plan or make decisions quickly when it’s unclear what is truly driving business success. Bring those mission-critical KPIs to light, however, and you can quickly get everyone aligned around them.

But before homing in on these metrics, it’s imperative to step back, take a look at the entire organization, and recognize that performance is tracked differently in each department and team. Your core KPI model should take into account different flavors of measurement strategy across departments, recognizing the metrics that weave through multiple departments. This will help ensure that planning is collaborative and comprehensive, and that tracking progress and reporting means the same thing to all the players involved. The biggest plus in all of this? This shared measurement strategy establishes company-wide ownership and direction.

To help you isolate your organization’s KPIs (and ultimately to plan better), consider these three steps.

1. Partner with operational leaders to uncover their mission-critical KPIs.

Rather than try to guess what functional leaders care about, take the time to sit down with those key stakeholders and walk through how they define success. What does their measurement strategy look like? How do they currently track and manage their own progress? What are their data sources? Whom are their reports important to? Do they use specific language or terminology that might mean different things to people in other departments? Be as thorough as possible in fleshing out their measurement strategy and any processes they have in place to support it.

2. Keep it simple.

People can get caught up in attempting to adhere to KPIs that aren’t easily tracked or aren’t even truly indicative of performance. Avoid establishing complicated processes or adding new, hyper-focused metrics to the mix. Yes, your goal is to maintain accuracy, but you need to balance it with minimum resistance. The last thing you want is to get lost in data and complicated algorithms, forcing you in the end to have to manually follow up with gatekeepers when the time comes to pull a report.

3. Establish a reporting system.

After isolating the necessary KPIs, you’ll need to set up some workflows around reporting. What are the tools you need to access and generate a KPI report? Are these tools accessible and easy to use for all stakeholders? What are the bottlenecks, and who are the gatekeepers holding back the flow of KPI reports? Ensure your reporting operations are accessible, easy to use, and accurate enough to give you a true snapshot of your organization’s progress—without data overload.

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

FP&A Done Right: 5 Ways Dashboards Empower The Office of Finance

April 23, 2021 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

This is a guest blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning, exploring how to unlock hidden opportunities with dashboards & analytics.

Visualizing data is often the fastest way to identify trends and patterns that lead to insights and better decision making. That’s because the simple clarity of visualizing data via interactive dashboards can reveal hidden opportunities that likely would have been missed in more traditional analysis and sharing of data.

Here are five ways dashboards can help identify valuable insights that may have been overlooked in the past.

1. Dashboards encourage company-wide planning (or xP&A)

Simply making dashboards accessible to stakeholders throughout the organization represents a huge win in itself—and a significant step toward breaking down silos. Yet beyond that, increasing the number of people who have access to data presented in digestible formats exponentially increases the chances of those aha moments occurring. The production floor manager will surely have a different perspective than the CFO. When that perspective is informed with accessible data delivered via a dashboard, the stage is set for new efficiencies and improved productivity.

2. Dashboards show instead of tell

There’s a reason the phrases “go through the numbers” and “eyes glaze over” are often uttered in the same sentence. Traditionally, delivering financial information has largely been a one-way conversation with the finance team presenting mundane reports and data downloads. With the exception of the number crunchers in finance and accounting, many business partners get lost or disinterested when presented with a number or data overload. Dashboards avoid this challenge by elevating the data to the next level and using graphics and visualizations to clearly show data in formats that provide key context and clarity. When data gets presented in highly visual and familiar formats, business users can often quickly see challenges and opportunities that otherwise might have been missed.

3. Dashboards offer customized views for different thinkers

Different people consume information in a wide range of ways. Some may be more comfortable viewing data presented in standard bar, column, gauge, area, and doughnut charts. Yet others benefit from data presented in more engaging or interactive formats. Workday Adaptive Planning dashboards feature data visualization that includes funnels, dials, waterfalls, bubbles, histograms, radars, and Pareto charts. Users across locations and on any device can view data in the formats that connect with their unique way of learning and thinking.

4. Dashboards are ever-present

Even finance pros and business leaders who are adept at extracting insights from traditional reporting face the challenge of locating reports once they are filed away. And once people find the report, they have the time-consuming process of checking if the data is still accurate. Conversely, dashboards are continuously available via a wide range of devices with data updated in real time, assuring users that they are working with the latest available information. So if conditions change or a new opportunity arises, easy-to-access data visualization is there to support decision-making and reveal how an opportunity may be quickly leveraged.

5. Dashboards are inviting and simple to use

The simple power of dashboards is that they are easy to use and invite users to experiment, explore, and discover. By eliminating the complexity barrier, the odds of uncovering hidden opportunities expand dramatically. Ultimately, dashboards create the opportunity for self-service analysis for everyone. That allows any user to perform drilldown analytics, create period-to-period comparisons, and explore iterative what-if analyses that can effectively identify issues that need immediate attention while also identifying trends that could be leveraged through sales and targeted marketing efforts.

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

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Save Personal Views on Sheets with Dashboard

April 21, 2021 by Michelle Song Leave a Comment

If you open any sheets via the Sheet tab in Workday Adaptive Planning, you can only save one view per sheet per version per user. Prior to the 2020 R2 Release, the only workaround to save the same sheet with multiple views is using EIP, Excel Interface for Planning, and open the sheet in multiple tabs or workbooks.

With the 2020 R2 Release, you now can save multiple views for the same sheet in the same tab per version in Dashboard. This function is extremely helpful to users that manage multiple departments, or anyone who wants to view the same data with different views in one tab.

In the example below, I opened the Product Revenue sheet twice in the same dashboard. The top sheet is showing the Gross Revenue account in the Product Revenue sheet for Customer 1 by Product values. The bottom sheet is showing the same Product Revenue sheet but by Accounts.

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Save Personal Views in Dashboard

Once the Display Option is applied to the sheet in Dashboard, it is automatically saved for the selected version and there is no need to click the Save icon. If the dashboard is a shared dashboard, the latest published changes will become the new view of the sheets in that dashboard.

Here is another example. The top one has a filter to show New York employees and the second one has a filter to show just the employees in Canada.

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? Our team here at Revelwood can help! Contact us info@revelwood.com for more information.

FP&A Done Right: What Type of CFO Are You?

April 9, 2021 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

This is a guest blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning. It is part 1 in a two-part series on the changing role of the CFO.

Finance has gained new perspectives from the impact of COVID-19, which has created the imperative for every business to move forward as a more agile and digitally enabled function.

But it can be tough for finance leaders to rise above day-to-day responsibilities to fill the big-picture role their companies need. Many formerly tactical CFOs have become strategic CFOs by taking one step at a time.

Here are three common hurdles on a CFO’s path to becoming more strategic and transformational—and how to move beyond them.

Hurdle #1: Cumbersome Planning Process

If the budget planning process is an onerous, time-intensive endeavor, it will remain stuck as an annual activity. That means financial insights are relatively static, reactive, and error-prone. To be strategic, CFOs are moving toward more frequent forecasting that needs a streamlined process.

Continuous planning requires financial teams to move beyond mere risk mitigation and financial metrics and to consider operational metrics and opportunity identification. This requires shifting your starting point. Rather than beginning in the past, with last year’s performance, you have to start in the future. Define and establish where you’re headed and the financial resources needed to get there.

Once you have these goals, the next step is to define a schedule for your company to reach those goals. When will strategic reviews take place? How do they translate into operational plans, and how do those plans mesh with your monthly, quarterly, or annual forecasts?

Hurdle #2: Time-intensive Data Management

Creating a streamlined process requires strong financial leadership. CFOs have to not only measure and report on financial and operational metrics, but also effectively communicate to the entire company its progress on financial and strategic goals. This takes time and sustained effort—which means you can’t bury your head in the numbers all day.

This is where leveraging technology comes in. At some organizations, finance departments spend up to two-thirds of their time gathering and managing financial data and ensuring its accuracy. That means there’s little time left for analysis, and the CFO isn’t able to rely on that deeper thinking when the CEO comes seeking advice.

In order to rise above this scenario, you have to make sure your team is using self-service, especially in reporting and analytics, and automation. A simple, powerful self-service platform provides real-time data, which frees up team members to do the deeper work of investigating that data without continually having to request more information.

Hurdle #3: Department Silos

When the finance team is viewed as a separate department on its own little island, everyone loses. Isolation makes it harder to gather accurate, real-time data. That makes budget managers less invested in the budget-planning process, which in turn makes it less likely that departments are held accountable for hitting their budgets and benchmarks. And it happens a lot: Nearly half of respondents in a Workday Adaptive Planning survey of CFOs said their teams could stand to collaborate better.

To avoid this downward spiral, high-performing companies increasingly train their finance teams to be well-rounded leaders from the get-go. By emphasizing general leadership and management skills in addition to quantitative mastery, CFOs ensure their departments are fully invested in the budget process. Put another way: In a world where the future is harder and harder to predict, the best plans must involve everyone in the business. That’s the value of company-wide planning, or extended planning and analysis (xP&A).

For FP&A practitioners, that means working with your team to ensure everyone is communicating clearly and consistently with the rest of the company. And “communicating” doesn’t mean throwing a ton of data at busy colleagues. The information you share has to be relevant and customized to different business units so each team can easily consume it.

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

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Excel Substitute

March 3, 2021 by Michelle Song Leave a Comment

We have something different for today’s Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks post – an Excel tip! Our Adaptive Planning users also use Excel, so we thought they’d find this helpful.

Have you ever wanted to get rid of spaces in some of your Excel cells? Maybe you do not want a cell to have separate words and instead want to use an underscore character. Or maybe you are in a situation where you want to adjust a prefix for a certain range of cells. You can use Excel’s find and replace functionality, but this approach could lead to a time consuming effort if you want to pick and choose the cells where it applies.

Excel’s SUBSTITUTE function can help you solve this problem. The SUBSTITUTE function is used to find a specific set of characters and replace it with something else while also giving you the ability to define details within cells.

The syntax of the function is:

=SUBSTITUTE (text, old_text, new_text)

text
- This is the source that will be changed; this is typically a cell reference.
old_text
- This is the subtext that will be replaced.
new_text
- This is what will replace the old subtext

If the cell in A5 consists of “Happy Birthday” then it can be updated to “Happy_Birthday” via the following:

=SUBSTITUTE (A5, “ “, “_”)

In addition, the parameter that defines the new text can also be a cell reference. This gives you the ability to quickly change the results of a large set of data by simply updating a single cell.

This approach will allow you to quickly find and replace characters within specific cells instead of having to manually go through a set of cells via Excel’s find and replace functionality.

The team at Revelwood has been recognized by Adaptive for its thought leadership in the space, commitment to its Adaptive Insights practice, and its rapid achievements of milestones. Visit Revelwood’s Knowledge Center for our Adaptive Insights Tips & Tricks or sign up here to get our Adaptive Insights Tips & Tricks delivered directly to your inbox. Not sure where to start with Adaptive Insights? Our team here at Revelwood can help! Contact us info@revelwood.com for more information.

FP&A Done Right: Achieve More Reliable Financial Forecasting

February 26, 2021 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

This is a guest blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning, written by Gary Cokins. Cokins is an internationally recognized expert, speaker and author in enterprise and corporate performance management systems. In this piece Cokins outlines three steps for more reliable forecasting.

When a company fails to meet its financial targets, business leaders want to know why. Was it the pandemic? Did sales underperform? Did operations overspend? Were their purchases more expensive than expected? Was productivity below established standards? Did finance develop a forecast that was wrong from the start?

Determining the causes of budget variances is an effective way to avoid similar missteps in the future, as well as during times of disruption. But many businesses struggle to understand the causes of variances and to define a process that will turn out accurate forecasts every quarter.

Finance and business teams must work together to identify the activities or data gaps that led to a missed forecast projection and caused price, cost, and efficiency variances. Whether poor decisions were made, the business landscape changed, or customer needs evolved, digging into the root cause starts with building relationships based on trust and transparency.

Companies need to continuously answer these three questions: What? So what? and Then what? Answering the first question—What happened?—requires good reporting with visibility. Answering the second question—So what?—involves separating the signal from the noise and determining what is relevant from the reporting. Arguably, answering the third question—Then what?—is the most important and critical part, because only these decisions impact the future.

Here are three tips that will help your finance team set performance targets and standards that company leaders can be confident in.

Step #1: Bring everyone to the table

Hitting a financial forecast isn’t just about meeting sales goals. Employee turnover, travel expenses, marketing costs, and other operational expenditures must be accurately projected to create a viable financial forecast.

But finance teams can’t analyze all these variables on their own. They need to work closely with sales, HR, marketing, operations, and executive teams to get a clear view of past performance, changes on the horizon, and potential risks and opportunities.

Centralizing financial information in a single shared database reduces the time it takes for finance teams to gather this information, giving them more time to focus on analyzing causes of variances and speculating on potential outcomes. Collaborative financial planning software also helps keep information up-to-date by making reporting easier for other departments.

It may take time to get the whole company on board with a new data collection, integration, and delivery process, but the payoff that comes with more reliable reporting is worth the effort.

Step #2: Plan for multiple outcomes

It’s impossible to know for certain what the future might hold. No one has a crystal ball for this. But there are ways to view the planning horizon. One way is to create multiple projections that account for different scenarios. This can include sensitivity analysis by changing some of the variables, such as the forecast sales volume and mix, to calculate projected profits. This can keep your company running on all cylinders—regardless of what comes its way.

Project for at least two possible outcomes—one optimistic and another cautious—so you can create proactive response plans. Look closely at the assumed factors and variables that are most likely to impact your projections. For instance, a change in the price of raw materials, in labor rates, or the emergence of a new competitor could create pricing pressure, which might lead to a decline in revenues.

Scenario planning can also help companies navigate regulatory changes that come with political transition or turmoil. According to a survey by KPMG, 77% of U.S. CEOs say they are focusing more on scenario planning to manage change in the current political environment.

However, with the increasing responsibilities falling on FP&A teams, many feel they don’t have enough time for this type of proactive planning. Sixty percent of CFOs estimate that ad hoc analysis, such as running a new scenario for the forecast, takes up to five days, according to a survey we published a few years back.

Planning and budgeting software can help FP&A teams speed up the time it takes to outline the financial implications of different scenarios and outcomes. The right tool lets teams run reports with the click of a few buttons, giving them more time to consider the risks, opportunities, and assumptions to create comprehensive response plans.

Step #3: Collect customer data

Understanding changing customer preferences, needs, and demands can also help improve the accuracy of financial projections—and boost a company’s overall financial health. However, a third of U.S. CEOs say the depth of their customer insights is limited by a lack of quality customer data, according to KPMG. So it’s no surprise that nearly two-thirds expect to invest in data analytics technology in the next three years.

“The whole idea of knowing what the customer wants before they want it is sort of the brass ring,” Tom Hayes, president and CEO of Tyson Foods, told KPMG. “We have real-time data from the shelf back to our supply chain. It takes out a lot of waste and helps us to more accurately forecast—a great benefit for products with a short shelf life.”

Taking the right steps to figure out where a missed forecast and associated assumptions went wrong will help keep business performance on target year after year.

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

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Interactive Dashboards – Dynamic Planning with Embedded Sheets

February 24, 2021 by Dave Miersch Leave a Comment

More often than not, clients of Revelwood will make use of multiple sheets in Workday Adaptive Planning to support different aspects of their planning process(es). When using several sheets to make changes to key drivers, assumptions and scenario drivers, clients often ask the question, “How can I quickly and easily see how the changes I make on one sheet impact the rest of my budget?” One tried and true method was using multiple screens or windows with multiple sheets or reports open to see how the model changes. While this method works, it can be cumbersome and as many of us are working remotely for the foreseeable future, it likely becomes problematic if we do not have access to all those great monitors at home.

Another more dynamic solution is using the newer functionality of embedded sheets within Dashboards.

Within Dashboards, users now have the ability to add any Standard, Modeled, or Cube sheet you have created within Adaptive Planning to enter data without ever having to navigate away from our dashboard view(s). These sheets act as usable copies of your existing sheets allowing changes to be made and instantly reflected on related charts and dashboards.

In the below example, we have three Dashboards. Sales Volume & Margin by Month, budgeted Sales Revenue vs Prior Year Actuals and budgeted Sales Volume vs Prior Year Actuals.

Interactive dashboards in Workday Adaptive Planning

While in edit mode, navigate to the dashboard selector and simply drag and drop the “Sheet” option into your dashboard window. An additional drop-down menu will then be available to select all available sheet options to choose from.

Learn about interactive dashboards in Workday Adaptive Planning

Select the appropriate sheet you want to use to make changes and analyze the overall model impact and you’re all set! You now have your previously created and defined sheet embedded within your dashboard.

In my example, we have added our “Bottle Release Schedule” sheet which is essentially our sales unit planning sheet.

Understanding interactive dashboards in Workday Adaptive Planning

Making any changes and saving them within the Dashboard will automatically funnel through to dependent charts and dashboards. We are going to add 1,000 units sold in the month of April 2021 in rows 1 and 3, click save in the sheet, and then see how those changes impact our entire model in real time.

Dynamic planning with embedded sheets in Workday Adaptive Planning

We can quickly see that making those changes has added 2,000 units to our total sales volume as well as $300,000 in additional revenue.

Any sheet created within Adaptive can be pulled into dashboards for more fluent and flexible planning and reporting in one view. While some functionality is limited vs using the sheet itself, having the ability to make changes and immediately see the impact without managing multiple windows can be a valuable tool in the heart of budget season.

The team at Revelwood has been recognized by Workday Adaptive Planning for our thought leadership in the space, commitment to our Workday Adaptive Planning practice, and our rapid achievements of milestones. 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.

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Excel Reporting Using a Report Template

February 17, 2021 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

Many users of Workday Adaptive Planning utilize OfficeConnect for their Excel reporting. But not all users will have access to OfficeConnect, depending on your organization. But there is another great option for Excel reporting called a Report Template.

What is the difference between OfficeConnect and a Report Template?

Templates are Excel files which can be added to regular reports, including repeating reports. Instead of running an HTML report, you can have a custom Excel report. Below are some nice features, as once you use it, it will become a favorite for reporting.

Report Templates allow:

Custom formatting data from Adaptive such as background color, font color, and font type.
Calculations on the data, along with including graphs and notes.
Use with repeating reports.
A saved Excel file attached to a report.
Macros can be added to templates.

Here is a quick tutorial on how to create an Excel report using a report template.

Locate the Adaptive Planning HTML report which has the data you want for your Excel report.
a. Here is an HTML Report.
b. Locate the report in the Reports screen.
Right click on the report and choose Run as Excel, and the file will download.
Open the downloaded Excel file. You will see the Excel data on the first sheet.
a. The report is the same as the report in Step 1 but in Excel.
On this sheet, you can change fonts, and add conditional formatting, calculations, etc. If you want to add other sheets for more reporting, you can use formulas to reference data on the first sheet.
a. In this example, we have changed fonts style and added conditional formatting for the % Var column.
b. In this example, we added another sheet and created a graph and ratios using formulas to reference the first sheet (report data). You can add multiple sheets to create a customized report or a report book. You can also hide sheets. For example, the Report Info tab Adaptive includes in all excel reports or the first sheet with the data.
Return to the report in Adaptive Planning.
a. Right click on the same HTML report and select Attach Template.
b. Click Choose File button and select the excel file you just created which has your updated report with formatting, formulas, graphs, etc. Click OK. Once the file is selected click Open.
c. The file icon will change colors from blue to green, so you know the report has been properly attached.
Run the report and it will automatically download as an Excel file. Your existing report has been generated and has applied all applicable prompts. For example, the month of data will change per the prompt option selected.

You now have an Excel report! And can run it anytime!

FP&A Done Right: The Role of KPIs in Driver-Based Budgets

February 12, 2021 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

This is a guest blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning, on why finance teams should focus on KPIs and business drivers.

Gone are the days when business leaders were narrowly focused on just the net cash flow or balance sheet. Modern finance pros are asked to track not only a lengthy list of metrics, but also KPIs beyond the traditional finance arena. The old adage is, “You get what you measure.” When managers are held accountable for attaining or exceeding KPI targets defined by the executive team, their actions and decisions become aligned to the executives’ strategy.

Why the focus on KPIs and business drivers? Well, more leaders are realizing that to stay competitive and agile, their formulated strategies need to be managed and executed and that traditional budgets are no longer cutting it. Creating detailed, upfront financial projections for the next year and allocating budgets and planning inventory to cost centers no longer makes sense in today’s rapidly changing business environment. Instead, staying nimble and strategically savvy means embracing active planning and driver-based budgets. These driver-based budgets are categorized by:

Budgeting and planning in smaller batches with horizon-adjusted precision
Allocating resources in a fast and flexible manner
Tying budgets and planning inventory to outcomes rather than cost centers

Identify the KPIs that drive your financial results

Most organizations have a company-wide set of standardized and consistent metrics they track. But what are the KPIs that truly impact the company’s financial performance?

The answer will vary from industry to industry and company to company, but identifying the right drivers means considering the entire operational arc of the business. For instance, you might have drivers from:

Pipeline or funnel: prospective customer leads, first meetings, opportunities, sales generated pipeline, add-on revenue, channel sourced pipeline
Sales: total customers, ramped representatives, average revenue per deal, current quarter pipeline, new logos, future quarter pipeline
Customer success: customer satisfaction score, at-risk customer retention, cancellations, billable hours, time to value, average hold time
Finance: manufacturing costs, freight and distribution, free net cash flow, revenue per headcount, cost per headcount
Marketing: website visits, event attendees, new vs. returning leads, social followers, database size, earned media

Shift the conversation

“Did you hit your numbers?” That’s a question anyone who’s worked in a static planning environment has probably encountered. But with a driver-based budget and active planning, the psychology around targets actually shifts. Instead of thinking in operational silos and individual or department wins, the conversation becomes more integrated thinking about end-to-end business processes across the silos. Rather than hitting a static target, people are working to make sure certain drivers are meeting or exceeding expectations, to help fuel future success and growth at the organization.

Sometimes, that subtle but powerful shift can be hard for executives to wrap their heads around. But once the C-suite is sold on driver-based budgeting, the results usually speak for themselves. And many execs find that the forward-looking approach of driver-based budgets and KPIs actually aligns better with how they operate: with an eye toward the future, rather than toward the past.

Stop forecasting to the end of year

With an annual plan or budget, fiscal year end Dec. 31 is the end line. But business doesn’t actually come screeching to a halt at the end of the fiscal calendar year, and all of the effort required to put together an annual budget can be so onerous and complicated that it might take months in advance to assemble. That means some teams are racing toward an artificial deadline with little to no visibility into what the budget will bring even a few months into the future. Sounds like a nightmare, right?

We’re not arguing to do away with the annual plan. But with a driver-based approach, it’s easier to also create a rolling financial forecast—a roadmap for the next quarter or six months or 12 months, no matter what point you’re at in the fiscal calendar. Creating a rolling financial forecast isn’t nearly as time-intensive or intimidating as you might think when you have the input variables and parameter supported by an automated system. Because this forecasting happens more frequently and because it’s based on drivers and KPIs—rather than every single granular data point at the finance team’s fingertips—a rolling financial forecast can be both quick and sophisticated.

Are you ready to dramatically increase the agility, alignment, and accuracy of your company’s budget? It starts with shaking free of the status quo—static planning, traditional budgets, myriad metrics—and focusing on the business drivers and KPIs that will actually shape the future financial performance.

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

Check out more FP&A Done Right posts here:

FP&A Done Right: Predictions of “Extraordinary” Growth This Year

FP&A Done Right: Collaborate More When Planning

FP&A Done Right: Achieve More Reliable Financial Forecasting

FP&A Done Right: 3 Steps for Selecting your KPIs

FP&A Done Right: 5 Ways Dashboards Empower The Office of Finance