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Using Workday Adaptive Planning for Headcount Planning

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This post continues our series on how we use Workday Adaptive Planning to solve problems. Each blog post focuses on a real-world client experience where Revelwood was presented with a unique or thorny problem.  We’ll explain our approach to how we solved it.

Revelwood Client: This global SaaS company has an easy-to-use platform for blockchain and crypto operations. The company enables exchanges, custodians, banks, trading desks and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through patent-pending SGX & MPC technology. 

Problem: Personnel / headcount planning

Scenario: The company wanted a detailed personnel model to manage headcount and deliver up-to-date, easy-to-understand information. 

How We Helped: Revelwood created a purpose-built personnel model for Workday Adaptive Planning and integrated it with HiBob, a human resources (HR) software platform. Workday Adaptive Planning pulls the HR actuals directly into the model. This integration automates a task that otherwise would be manual, tedious and frequent. The SaaS company can now see headcount information and data on each employee – including historical information – in Workday Adaptive Planning.

Do you have a challenge you’d like to leverage Workday Adaptive Planning for? Reach out to us – we can help!

Read the posts in our series, How We Solve Problems Using Workday Adaptive Planning

Using Workday Adaptive Planning to Model Revenue and Expenses

Workday Adaptive Planning for Budgeting and Forecasting for a SaaS Business Model

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Workday Adaptive Planning for Incorporating Foreign Transactions

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This post continues our series on how we use Workday Adaptive Planning to solve problems. Each blog post focuses on a real-world client experience where Revelwood was presented with a unique or thorny problem.  We’ll explain our approach to how we solved it.

Revelwood Client: A privately held biotech company striving to accelerate the leap to a more nature-positive era for agriculture by solving performance and delivery challenges of traditional chemical and biological crop protection. 

Problem: Inaccurate and Cumbersome Foreign Transactions

Scenario: The company is headquartered in Massachusetts, with offices and operations in North Carolina, Florida, Brazil, Italy and Switzerland. Their Workday Adaptive Planning system needed to incorporate different statutory requirements on a state and country basis in a detailed manner. With its previous Excel-based system, the company was able to factor in payroll taxes, Social Security and other details for the United States, but they had to use an assumed percentage for other countries.

How We Helped: Revelwood created a purpose-built model for payroll that incorporates a wide range of scenarios and details. For example, employees in Brazil get a lunch stipend and other payments. Italy has 14 pay periods instead of 12 pay periods. The new model in Workday Adaptive Planning models payroll differences by state, region and country. By incorporating country-level details, this biotech company gets a much more detailed – and accurate – view of payroll, and ultimately, current cash flow.

Do you have a challenge you’d like to leverage Workday Adaptive Planning for? Reach out to us – we can help!

Read the posts in our series, How We Solve Problems Using Workday Adaptive Planning

Using Workday Adaptive Planning to Model Revenue and Expenses

Workday Adaptive Planning for Budgeting and Forecasting for a SaaS Business Model

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Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Write-back for OfficeConnect

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There is a lot to be excited about with Workday Adaptive Planning’s new release. From changes in the Adaptive Planning interface itself, to updates with Workday’s OfficeConnect Excel plug-in, there is something that will benefit every user. Today we will be focussing on OfficeConnect and the new write-back to Adaptive Planning capability. 

Getting Started

To get started with the new write-back feature, it is important to make sure that your OfficeConnect plug-in is updated and the most recent version is installed. If up to date, you will be able to see a write-back section under your OfficeConnect ribbon on Excel. Write-back will not initially be available to every user in the Adaptive Planning instance. It must be enabled. This can be enabled by going to the “Administrative” permission set and selecting the “Write-back from external sources” check box.

Functionality

This new feature allows you to update your planning data without leaving Excel. This makes it super easy for users who are comfortable with Excel and have not fully gotten acclimated to Adaptive Planning. Using OfficeConnect allows the user to use common Excel capabilities such as formulas and copy/paste functions.

Once you are in OfficeConnect and have a report built out, it is important to know which cells can be edited for write-back. You must select a range of columns or rows with a valid leaf level intersection and a time roll-up cannot be included such as a quarter or year.

Once you have your columns and/or rows that you would like to use for write-back, you could go ahead and hit “Write-back” in the OfficeConnect Ribbon. This will now highlight the editable rows yellow. You can now make edits directly on this sheet and it will transfer directly over to Adaptive Planning. Cell contents turn blue to show that an edit has been made. Lastly, all you need to do is hit submit and you have successfully completed a write back.

Once you have made changes, you can go ahead and submit. After submitting you will realize that the values have changed. You can proceed to exit write-back mode by just hitting the write back button again.

Revelwood is an award-winning, Platinum Solution Provider for Workday Adaptive Planning. We build solutions for the Office of Finance that minimize your risk by seamlessly incorporating business analytics into your everyday thinking. By combining the software with our best practices and out-of-the-box applications, we help businesses achieve their full potential with Workday Adaptive Planning.

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: New Feature – Long-Running Processes in Workday’s 2024R2 Release

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Machine Learning Predictive Forecaster

Top 5 Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks from 2024

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Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: New Feature – Long-Running Processes in Workday’s 2024R2 Release

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A game-changing feature has been introduced in the latest Workday 2024R release: long-running processes. This new report empowers administrators with planning center permissions to monitor and manage processes that have been running for 30 seconds or longer.

Why is this important? 

Processes that linger in the background for extended periods can create bottlenecks, hindering the overall performance of your instance. With the long-running processes feature you can easily identify and address these slowdowns, ensuring your models run smoothly. When necessary, you can cancel these lengthy processes and reschedule them for times of lower traffic.

Key Benefits

This feature is beneficial for users encountering delays or performance issues with specific tasks. By providing a straightforward way to cancel these lengthy processes, you can enhance efficiency and maintain optimal performance levels.

How It Works

The long-running processes report is located in the Planning Center’s new Process Dashboard section. The long-running processes report provides a list of processes exceeding the 30-second mark, along with the usernames of the individuals who initiated them.

Modeling➜Model Management➜Planning Center➜Long-Running Processes

Types of Processes Included and Able to be Canceled:

  • Sheet loads
  • APIs
  • Admin updates
  • Excel exports
  • Imports

For instance, if you notice a large import task is dragging down performance during peak usage times, you can cancel it to allow regular processes to continue unhindered. After canceling a process, it will no longer appear in your list, providing a clear overview of your ongoing tasks.

Additionally, if you choose to cancel a process, you may want to reach out to the user who initiated it, informing them of the action taken and suggesting they try again during off-peak hours.

With the long-running processes feature, Workday is enhancing the administrative experience, allowing for better resource management and improved performance. Make the most of this new tool to keep your workflows efficient and responsive!

Revelwood is an award-winning, Platinum Solution Provider for Workday Adaptive Planning. We build solutions for the Office of Finance that minimize your risk by seamlessly incorporating business analytics into your everyday thinking. By combining the software with our best practices and out-of-the-box applications, we help businesses achieve their full potential with Workday Adaptive Planning.

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Machine Learning Predictive Forecaster

Top 5 Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks from 2024

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Archived Versions For Data Freeze 2024R2

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Using Workday Adaptive Planning to Model Revenue and Expenses

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This post continues our series on how we use Workday Adaptive Planning to solve problems. Each blog post focuses on a real-world client experience where Revelwood was presented with a unique or thorny problem.  We’ll explain our approach to how we solved it.

Revelwood Client: A multi-site healthcare organization that provides human services programs at 174 sites provides individualized and compassionate services to people facing challenges with developmental disabilities, mental illness, substance abuse disorders and homelessness. The company has approximately 2,200 employees.

Problem: An Inability to Model Revenue and Expenses

Scenario: The healthcare organization had a manual, spreadsheet-based process for budgeting, planning, forecasting and reporting. The process impeded long-term budgeting and made forecasting on a strategic level problematic. 

How We Helped: The organization wanted to several big improvements from its Workday Adaptive Planning environment. One key area of focus was a Revenue Expense model. Revelwood built a custom model that enables the organization to create variable models that reveal why certain things happen. They can conduct what-if scenarios such as reducing expenses by a desired margin to see how it would impact the organization’s revenue objectives. This enables them to understand how revenue and expense structures would be impacted by changes at its sites.

Do you have a challenge you’d like to leverage Workday Adaptive Planning for? Reach out to us – we can help!

Read the posts in our series, How We Solve Problems Using Workday Adaptive Planning

Workday Adaptive Planning for Budgeting and Forecasting for a SaaS Business Model.

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The Hidden Value of Strategic Planning: Gaining Operational Efficiencies

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Effective financial planning and analysis (FP&A) is a cornerstone for any business looking to navigate uncertainties and capitalise on new opportunities. However, inefficiencies stemming from outdated processes and disconnected systems often prevent organisations from fully realising the potential of their planning efforts.

The Challenge of Operational Inefficiencies

Many organisations rely heavily on manual processes and outdated spreadsheet models, leading to several issues:

  • Time-Intensive Data Management: Manual effort to import and cleanse data from diverse source systems diverts focus from higher value activities and usually limits the timeliness and granularity of information available for planning.
  • Rigid and Error-Prone Models: Spreadsheet planning models require large amounts of ongoing manual updates with a high risk of broken links and formulas, hindering adaptability to business changes.
  • Collaboration Bottlenecks: Stakeholders from different parts of the organization struggle with aligning inputs and assumptions, causing delays and errors.
  • Ineffective Reporting: The burden on finance teams to generate and distribute reports on behalf of the wider business, limits the agility of performance analysis.

These inefficiencies not only drain resources but also reduce the strategic value of planning processes.

Embracing Modern Solutions

Cloud-based planning systems, like Workday Adaptive Planning, address these pain points by automating and streamlining processes. Here’s how:

  • Automated Data Integration: Integration tools pull data automatically from various systems, ensuring consistent and timely inputs without manual intervention. This improves data accuracy, granularity, and the ability to refresh models more frequently.
  • Flexible and Scalable Models: Modern systems allow automatic updates when new dimensions (e.g., new customers, new products, new business units) are added. This reduces the risk of errors and enables scenario planning in real-time.
  • Real-Time Collaboration: Stakeholders can work concurrently on shared models with controlled access, with key assumptions shared across the business. Automated workflows and audit trails simplify tracking and approval, fostering alignment across departments.
  • Dynamic Reporting and Analysis: Self-service tools empower users to create and explore reports without relying on finance teams. Features like drill-downs and dynamic dashboards enhance insight and transparency.

Benefits of Modernising FP&A

By addressing inefficiencies, businesses can unlock significant value:

  • Increased Planning Agility: More frequent and dynamic planning cycles enable better responses to market changes.
  • Improved Decision-Making: Enhanced collaboration and timely insights ensure decisions are based on the latest, most accurate data.
  • Greater Strategic Focus: Automating low-value tasks allows FP&A teams to focus on insights and driving actions.

A New Paradigm for Planning

As Dwight D. Eisenhower wisely said, “Plans are nothing; planning is everything.” Rather than simply generating a new budget or forecast, the planning process fosters collaboration, encourages forward-thinking, and aligns stakeholders with strategic goals. Modernising this process through advanced planning solutions empowers organisations to thrive in a fast-changing business environment.

Learn more about gaining operational efficiency by embracing strategic planning. Download the white paper, Removing Operational Inefficiencies to Unlock the Value of Planning.

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Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Machine Learning Predictive Forecaster

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Workday Adaptive Planning offers several features that allow users to achieve financial planning and analysis data solutions. One feature, predictive forecaster, leverages historical data to generate machine learning-based predictions within forecasted versions. With improved efficiency and accuracy, predictive forecasters can provide well-tuned predictions with the help of machine learning algorithms. In this blog post, we will delve into the steps needed to set up a predictive forecaster in Workday Adaptive Planning. 

Step 1: Permission Sets

In order to access the predictive forecaster, navigate to the “Permission Sets” tab of the “Administration” section. From there click edit (next to the Permission Sets of the accessing users). Finally, make sure the predictive forecaster is checked off. Now predictive forecaster will be available under “modeling.”

 

Step 2: Navigation 

In order to create a new predictive forecaster navigate to the “modeling” tab, choose “predictive forecast” and click “add new”.

Step 3: Necessary Requirements

To create the forecast, start by including a name and an optional description. Next, choose the sheet and the planned version that you want to populate with the data. Additionally, add the forecast start and end periods.

Step 4: Requirements continued

To continue filling out the necessary requirements select the accounts that you want to populate with the predicted data. There is the option to choose whether you want to populate based on levels or dimensions. Next for the “reference data” section, select the actual version that the algorithm will reference, as well as the start and end periods. Adaptive Planning requires users to maintain a 3:2 ratio of actuals to forecast.

Step 5: Algorithms

Finally, users must select which algorithm they want to deploy for their forecaster. AutoFit is the suggested algorithm because it selects the algorithm based on the seasonality of the data. Users also have the option to choose type of seasonality, add weekly seasonality, add multiplicative seasonality, to round values, and to add lever sheets. Several of these additional selections are only available for specific algorithms.

Predictive forecasting allows for users to leverage historical data to create well-defined predictions. The detailed criteria helps to create tailored data to the unique seasonality of the data. 

Revelwood is an award-winning, Platinum Solution Provider for Workday Adaptive Planning. We build solutions for the Office of Finance that minimize your risk by seamlessly incorporating business analytics into your everyday thinking. By combining the software with our best practices and out-of-the-box applications, we help businesses achieve their full potential with Workday Adaptive Planning.

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Top 5 Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks from 2024

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Archived Versions For Data Freeze 2024R2

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Data Validation Rules in Modeled Sheets

Home » Workday » Page 3

Budgeting That Works: How to Plan for Success in an Uncertain World

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The Budgeting Blues

You’ve just wrapped up another marathon annual budget cycle spanning multiple months, countless late nights and endless revisions; you’ve finally pinned down the dreaded planning gap between top-down targets and bottom-up submissions. You appear to have a fairly consistent set of functional budgets with marketing initiatives aligned with sales targets, which in turn are aligned with operational plans and a suitable workforce plan.  It is a masterpiece.  Unfortunately, during the months since the budget cycle started and the corporate targets were agreed, the world has moved on, leaving your budget masterpiece in tatters.

A Better Way: Driver-Based Budgeting

Surely, there is a better way?  Enter driver-based planning: a thoughtful approach that focuses on the key factors that truly move your business forward. Instead of getting bogged down in granular line-item details, driver-based budgeting focuses on identifying the key business drivers that really move the needle for your company. These could be things like sales growth, production capacity, headcount, or any other factors that have a major impact on financial performance.

By building your budgets and plans around a focused set of core drivers, you can create a more agile and responsive planning process. As the world changes, you can easily adjust your driver assumptions and assess the ripple effects across the business. Driver-based budgeting also aligns inputs to the right business owners – the sales team weighs in on bookings forecasts, operations gives their view on production capacity, and so on. This not only leads to more accurate plans, but also creates accountability and buy-in across the organization.

Defining the Right KPIs

To get started with driver-based budgeting, the first step is to nail down the right key performance indicators (KPIs) for your business. But more isn’t always better when it comes to KPIs. The most effective driver-based models focus on a concise set of metrics that:

  1. 1. Can be reliably and consistently measured for historical actuals
  2. 2. Are predictable enough to forecast
  3. 3. Have a direct link to key business goals and objectives
  4. 4. Have clear business ownership

For example, a software company might zero in on KPIs like new logo bookings, billings growth, and sales rep productivity as core drivers of the sales model. The finance team partners with sales leaders to pressure-test the assumptions, and the model projects how different scenarios would flow through to revenue, margins, and cash.

Eliminating Data Silos

With the right KPIs defined, the next step is to eliminate data silos and create “one source of truth” in your budgeting process. Driver-based budgeting thrives on collaboration and integration – sales, operations, finance, and executive teams all need to be looking at the same set of numbers. Modern cloud-based planning platforms make it easy to connect data, build driver logic, and engage business users in a streamlined process.

Planning with Agility

Driver-based budgeting enables a dynamic, rolling forecast rhythm to replace the annual or quarterly budgeting cycle. By refreshing forecasts on a monthly basis (or more frequently), you always have an up-to-date view of where the business is headed, allowing for more informed decision-making and better resource allocation.

Pair this with the ability to regularly and efficiently generate multiple additional “what-if” scenario versions and you gain the agility to quickly course-correct as conditions change and new opportunities or threats arise.

A True Business Transformation

But driver-based budgeting is about more than just building a better mousetrap. Done right, it can be truly transformative for an organization. It elevates the role of finance to focus on strategic business drivers rather than just policing the numbers. It creates alignment and accountability across functions. And most importantly, it arms decision-makers with visibility and insight to navigate through periods of volatility and change.

Start today

In a world of rapid change and pervasive uncertainty, agility is the ultimate competitive advantage. By focusing your planning efforts on the critical drivers of your business, you can position your organization to ride out the storms and seize new opportunities. So ditch those broken spreadsheets, engage your business partners, and start your journey towards more dynamic, driver-based plans. Your future self will thank you.

Revelwood is dedicated to helping the Office of Finance succeed through the strategic use of technology. We have a nearly 30 year history helping CFOs and FP&A leaders modernize and transform the Office of Finance. Our approach is to focus on your success, speak business first and to leverage best-in-class technology that suits your organization’s unique needs. Contact us at info@revelwood.com to start a conversation on how we can help your Office of Finance be thes best it can be.

More from our FP&A Done Right Series:

10 Steps to Transform Financial Planning & Analysis: A Guide to a Successful FP&A Implementation

Workday Named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Financial Planning Software

Recommendations from the 2024 CFO Study

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Workday Adaptive Planning for Budgeting and Forecasting for a SaaS Business Model

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This post continues our series on how we use Workday Adaptive Planning to solve problems. Each blog post focuses on a real-world client experience where Revelwood was presented with a unique or thorny problem.  We’ll explain our approach to how we solved it.

Revelwood Client: A SaaS company that is a next-generation online data provider for insurers. 

Problem: Budgeting and Forecasting for a SaaS Business Model

Scenario: This fast-growing software-as-a-service needed a sophisticated approach to budgeting, planning, forecasting and reporting. The company is a very low-asset organization with minimal CapEx requirements. As a result, they are very focused on their P&L. They needed a model that reflects annual recurring revenue and enables them to manage multi-year planning several years out.  

How We Helped: We built a revenue model that incorporates annual recurring revenue. It enables the company to drill down into P&L data. This model gives the company insights into future revenue as well as historical revenue. They are able to take all of their P&L data and provide reporting on it to senior management and to the company’s investors. 

Do you have a challenge you’d like to leverage Workday Adaptive Planning for? Reach out to us – we can help!

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