Crosstabs in Workday Adaptive Planning are a great way to visualize and analyze data. This type of chart is great for comparing data sets and their relationships. Data in a Crosstab is visualized in a tabular format. Crosstab allows you to compare change over time, based on one or more accounts. Crosstabs also allow you to add different dimensions to view variances throughout the company. For example, a Crosstab can display a company’s revenue and net profit from different years, as well as filter by office or location.

How to Build a Crosstab

There are a few rules to follow in order to successfully build a Crosstab. At least one Account is needed to be selected to build a Crosstab. While Time is typically used in Crosstabs, it is not required when making the visualization. The Time Dimension will allow you to compare data results from previous time periods, which can allow businesses to analyze whether they are going in the right direction. Here is a step-by-step development of a Crosstab to view Expenses for a company on a quarterly basis and by Supervisor Organization (Operations, Corporate, or Other).

The First Step is selecting the Crosstab option and dragging it onto the plain space. Then we can edit the chart name. This is done by selecting the A in the right corner of your screen and then entering the name that you would like to use. For the sake of this example, the name used is “Expense Crosstab.”

The next step is adding the required accounts and dimensions. In this chart, Columns will be just time, while rows will be both Account and Supervisory Organization. To do this, click the stack of coins below the A on the right side of the screen. Under Columns, select Time, and under rows: Accounts 6100 Payroll, 6200 Taxes and Benefits, 6300 Office Expenses, 6400 Travel and Entertainment, 6500 Marketing, 6999 Other Expenses. You will also Add Supervisory Organization to rows as well. 

This is what the account will look like:

You can edit the time to be monthly, quarterly, or yearly. You can do this in the bottom right corner where it says “Quarter” by clicking and changing it to month or year. As of now, we have just one time period. Let’s make the dashboard a time range with multiple data points. To do this we will click the line with two small circles. 

Now that we have selected this, you can select the time range you would like your Crosstab to display. To adjust the time, click on the time period and make your selection. 

For this example, the range Q1 2021 to Q1 2022 was selected. Below is the final product for the Crosstab.

As shown, the Crosstab is a simple but effective way to paint and visualize numbers that any company can use for an easy way to track and analyze finances. 

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

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

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

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