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Workday Adaptive Planning

Workday Adaptive Planning

Overview

What is Workday Adaptive Planning?

Workday Adaptive Planning(formerly Adaptive Insights) is a financial planning and reporting tool. It includes automated budgeting and forecasting, financial reporting, and other active planning capabilities, including integrations with third-party products like Salesforce.

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Recent Reviews
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 45 features
  • Financial budgeting (171)
    9.0
    90%
  • Forecasting (166)
    8.7
    87%
  • Long-term financial planning (160)
    8.5
    85%
  • Management reporting (171)
    8.3
    83%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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What is Workday Adaptive Planning?

Workday Adaptive Planning(formerly Adaptive Insights) is a financial planning and reporting tool. It includes automated budgeting and forecasting, financial reporting, and other active planning capabilities, including integrations with third-party products like Salesforce.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • Setup fee optional
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://forms.workday.com/en…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Alternatives Pricing

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Kepion is a cloud planning & analytics software company that connects all organizations' teams under a single view of their business performance. We enable more intelligent decisions to be made by companies about their financial and operational future. Kepion global offices and partners deliver…

What is PlanGuru?

PlanGuru is budgeting, forecasting and financial analytics software for SMB's, Nonprofits and the Accountants/ Advisors that work with them.

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Features

BI Standard Reporting

Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.

9.3
Avg 8.0

Ad-hoc Reporting

Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.

8
Avg 8.3

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

8
Avg 8.2

Data Discovery and Visualization

Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.

7.7
Avg 7.6

Access Control and Security

Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.

9
Avg 8.7

Mobile Capabilities

Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

8.5
Avg 8.0

Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting

These activities are designed to assist with both data-driven operational, short-term planning and strategic long term planning

8.7
Avg 8.3

Consolidation and Close

Consolidation of data from multiple entities with currency management, reporting and audit trails.

7.6
Avg 8.0

Financial Reporting and Compliance

Financial statements and regulatory filings

8.5
Avg 8.2

Analytics and Reporting

Dashboards and scorecards for KPI monitoring and benchmarking

7.7
Avg 8.0

Integration

Ability to integrate with external applications.

8.3
Avg 8.3
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Product Details

What is Workday Adaptive Planning?

Everybody plans, and strategic planning is a crucial process for every business. This business planning software enables teams to create budgets, forecasts, and models in less time and with greater accuracy, so that the team can focus on analysis and strategy. Having up to date, reliable data, teams can focus on the story behind the numbers, and can improve business decisions and collaboration. Additionally, Workday Adaptive Planning and Consolidation delivers a unified solution that enables Accounting and Finance to accelerate the close, increase planning agility and drive faster, more informed decisions. The software was ranked a leader in Gartner's Cloud Planning and Analysis quadrant.

Workday Adaptive Planning Features

Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting Features

  • Supported: Long-term financial planning
  • Supported: Financial budgeting
  • Supported: Forecasting
  • Supported: Scenario modeling
  • Supported: Management reporting

Consolidation and Close Features

  • Supported: Financial data consolidation
  • Supported: Journal entries and reports
  • Supported: Multi-currency management
  • Supported: Intercompany Eliminations
  • Supported: Minority Ownership
  • Supported: Local and consolidated reporting
  • Supported: Detailed Audit Trails

Financial Reporting and Compliance Features

  • Supported: Financial Statement Reporting
  • Supported: Management Reporting
  • Supported: Excel-based Reporting
  • Supported: Automated board and financial reporting
  • Supported: XBRL support for regulatory filing

Analytics and Reporting Features

  • Supported: Personalized dashboards
  • Supported: Color-coded scorecards
  • Supported: KPIs
  • Supported: Cost and profitability analysis
  • Supported: Key Performance Indicator setting
  • Supported: Benchmarking with external data

Integration Features

  • Supported: Flat file integration
  • Supported: Excel data integration
  • Supported: Direct links to 3rd-party data sources

Workday Adaptive Planning Screenshots

Screenshot of Adaptive Planning balance sheets.Screenshot of Adaptive Discovery visuals.Screenshot of Adaptive Planning expense variance analysis report.Screenshot of Adaptive Discovery visuals with drill-down capabilities.Screenshot of Adaptive Planning in-sheet visualizations (waterfall chart)Screenshot of Sparklines are used to visualize trends and make adjustments visuallyScreenshot of Built-in audit trail and cell explorer will show the source and history of any metric, assumption or formula

Workday Adaptive Planning Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationApple iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Mobile Web
Supported CountriesUnited States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and many more!
Supported LanguagesEnglish, Spanish, French, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Polish, Dutch

Frequently Asked Questions

Workday Adaptive Planning(formerly Adaptive Insights) is a financial planning and reporting tool. It includes automated budgeting and forecasting, financial reporting, and other active planning capabilities, including integrations with third-party products like Salesforce.

Anaplan, OneStream, and Planful are common alternatives for Workday Adaptive Planning.

Reviewers rate Financial budgeting highest, with a score of 9.

The most common users of Workday Adaptive Planning are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).

Workday Adaptive Planning Customer Size Distribution

Consumers0%
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)0%
Mid-Size Companies (51-500 employees)60%
Enterprises (more than 500 employees)40%
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(337)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(26-50 of 203)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Justin Ballesteros | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Adaptive Insights is used for Financial Planning and Reporting activities. It's much more user friendly and efficient in regards to slicing and dicing the financial than extracting data to excel from our ERP.
  • Adaptive is an excellent tool in creating dynamic models for budgets and forecasts that can connect directly to our financials.
  • The most powerful tool of Adaptive is the ability to handle complex calculations behind the scenes while mupltiple users can access our instance and see the results in real-time.
  • Adaptive Insights could improve it's user training by offering more video instructions that our included in customer subscriptions.
  • The Office Connect feature is a great tool for working with financial data in Excel. I believe this will be an area to focus on improvement as many of their competitors have better functionality with pulling and drilling into data.
I believe Adaptive Insights can be instrumental for any business looking to streamline their operations strategy with finance. Adaptive is an excellent system to implement if a company is looking to invest in the business and looking for a product to help plan and track the results. It's well suited for providing department results vs what if scenarios,able to handle complex modeled calculations, and equip Finance to partner with key stakeholders in the business in real-time. Their product is much less reliant on IT as traditional reporting systems since Finance will typically troubleshoot issues.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Adaptive Insights is being used primarily as a shared sales forecast tool for one of our Sales Categories. The outside sales team input sales numbers directly and then we use that data to generate a monthly sales forecast. We also update actual sales information in Adaptive and report out based on actual-versus-budget/forecast.
  • Adaptive eliminates the need for Excel sheets for budgets.
  • Adaptive uses the cloud to share similar data and have data updated simultaneously, where with spreadsheets you might have to wait for someone to enter data into a spreadsheet or someone manually copy data into a master file. Adaptive becomes the master file.
  • It helps store history quite well when wanting to compare things from previous periods or to look at trends.
  • When looking at totals on average selling prices, the sheet tries to average all of the selling prices instead of calculating total sales dollar and volume.
Adaptive Insights is really good for reporting, budgeting, forecasting and eliminating Excel. Adaptive Insights is not so good with large amounts of data and can be cumbersome with part numbers or categories that change regularly.
Jared Bryant, CFE, MBA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Adaptive Insights is being used across the whole organization. Every cost center manager prepares an annual plan within Adaptive Insights.
  • Very Intuitive and easy to learn.
  • Adaptive Insights can be managed and owned by Finance people and does not require IT involvement.
  • Office Connect reporting is very useful.
  • The new process tracker feature could be expanded.
Adaptive Insights would be well suited for organizations that either prepare a bottom-up plan or top-down plan.
June 09, 2022

Great Product

Juljan Hebibasi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Adaptive Planning is a superior product. It has enabled greater and more detailed financial planning with significantly less work to do so. It has also reduced the time required to prepare the annual budget. A challenge for the operations staff was completing a budget with a system that is one size fits all. Adaptive allows me to build department-specific models driven by department KPIs. Operations now update KPIs which are mapped to the appropriate revenue and expense accounts. Office Connect is remarkable. We can update reports and data in excel with current GL totals by simply hitting refresh. The implementation was well done with time left over in the project to allow me to build my own models and get feedback from the implementation team. Moving forward, all modeling we did in excel will be done through Adaptive. It is our primary tool for day-to-day analysis.
  • Adaptive allows me to build department-specific models driven by that department KPI's
  • OfficeConnect is remarkable
  • All modeling we did in excel will be done through Adaptive
  • Because of the volume of models (user sheets), the ability to place models in folders based on the purpose or function would be helpful. That function does not exist so we have a long list of models and searching for the one we need is not efficient
  • Better documentation and training related to advanced features in the system. We would like to enhance our modeling and make it more efficient but can't determine if what we want to be done can be done.
  • Allowing GL accounts to link to more models we are an improvement. There is a limit on how many models you can link to a GL account. Because we use Adaptive for all our modeling, we have reached the capacity and had to develop workarounds.
Well Suited: 1. OfficeConnect is a game-changer in that it is a time-saver, allows for instant access to data for operations, and drives the greater analysis. 2. Ability to model and budget off KPIs and build department-specific budgets. 3. Ability to model multiple scenarios with relative ease. The ability to change an assumption enables quick analysis of multiple scenarios Less appropriate: 1. Because of the volume of models (user sheets), the ability to place models in folders based on the purpose or function would be helpful. That function does not exist so we have a long list of models and searching for the one we need is not efficient. 2. Better documentation and training related to advanced features in the system. We would like to enhance our modeling and make it more efficient but can't determine if what we want to be done can be done. 3. Allowing GL accounts to link to more models we are an improvement. There is a limit on how many models you can link to a GL account. Because we use Adaptive for all our modeling, we have reached the capacity and had to develop workarounds
January 09, 2022

Finance

Fidel Botchway | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Workday Adaptive Planning to track the budget and account for business expenses. From the time I started using Workday Adaptive Planning, I have become efficient at managing expenses in my team. Today we do not need to depend on accountants to provide department managers with monthly expense information for analysis and management [discussion].
  • Budget management
  • Expense tracking
  • Finance management
  • There should be a seamless integration between the accounting and the budget allocated.
Compassion as a Non Profit provides funds to partners for Child Support. Workday Adaptive Planning can help the Partner to Provide the expense information monthly so their fund allocation can be approved for disbursement. This way the Field Officers do not have to collect the data in excel for review and approval before loading it into the current system before disbursement is done.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We currently use [Workday Adapting Planning] as our sole planning tool in FP&A. We have all our budgeting and forecasting in [Workday Adapting Planning]. We partner with other departments to get their insights for the forecast, but we are the only group that actually uses the tool.
  • Cloud Native
  • Intuitive
  • Flexible
  • Easy to adapt
  • Adding additional departments/regions after implementation is a pain
  • I don't love how multi-currencies works
  • Drill down is clunky
  • Performance slows down as you grow your instance
Overall I really like [Workday] Adaptive Planning, and I would recommend it. I love the flexibility of the tool, and it's relatively intuitive. I think it is easier to learn than most planning tools which enables you to implement quicker and ramp new users faster. It's relatively easy to add new models or forecasts to the instance, which is nice for growing companies. I have noticed the instance has had some performance degradation as we've grown, so that would be one thing that has been frustrating. Overall I think it's a great tool, though, and I would purchase it again.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I currently work as an implementer of Workday Adaptive Planning for our clients. I see Workday Adaptive Planning being used by teams in order to improve their budgeting and planning processes. Many of my clients come from an Excel format for their planning process but are implementing Workday Adaptive Planning to automate many of the manual processes that currently have to happen in their Excel modeling. Adaptive is also used for its robust reporting abilities! Many clients that we work with are using Workday as their ERP so they connect the two systems through the Power of One to get real-time actuals data from the ERP into Workday Adaptive Planning.
  • Robust budgeting and planning sheets that allow for customizable modeling depending on the needs and area of the business
  • Web reporting out of Workday Adaptive Planning is great and is very user friendly
  • Integrations into different ERP systems, especially Workday
  • The Integration between Workday Adaptive Planning and NetSuite is difficult to get up and running. It functions well but is more complicated to set up than other ERPs.
  • Creation of sheets and normal maintenance is easy to use but can be a very complex process for those unfamiliar with how Workday Adaptive Planning works. Training is a must!
  • Lacking functionality in automating the multi-currency conversion process
Businesses that are in a pre-IPO or IPO stage. Workday Adaptive Planning is a great add on for any team that is already using Workday Financials or Workday HCM. Teams that have a complex planning process that is very manual in Excel are great candidates for Workday Adaptive Planning.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We had Workday Adaptive Planning due to the problems we were having with the company's financial performance, which evoked the manual planning management that we had been doing, which was less effective and more costly.
  • Ability to create customizable reports based on employee requirements.
  • Simple and ergonomic interface that allows easy location of each tool, all in a single view.
  • Each employee can get their expense summary and based on this do better resource planning.
  • Real-time cost and expense planning.
  • Ability to break down all monetary movements generated in the company.
  • Allows us to create cost scenarios where we can identify factors that may affect us in the future.
  • It is not possible to copy items between tabs, causing obstacles in the work.
  • Reports should be more complete and customizable.
  • It is complicated to import spreadsheet files without having to make modifications beforehand.
Workday Adaptive Planning distributes the resources of medium and large companies so that they can be more usable. It is based on business planning through data analysis to help people expand their knowledge and sharpen the effectiveness of scheduled tasks.
James Egan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Workday is used by OVO across the whole organisation to silo all of the relevant HR information for each and every employee. It is a centralised hub that allows a user to be able to log in at their pleasure and view any and all important documents pertaining to their employment.
  • One stop shop for employee and employer information.
  • Ability to ask for, view and give colleague feedback.
  • Ease of use, easy to navigate.
  • Easy to download important documents.
  • Some overlap between areas can be confusing for a new user.
  • Logging on from a new device can be a bit fiddly.
  • At first the time off scheduler can be a bit confusing.
I would say that Workday is great for day to day use by employees as it is a centralised hub where they can access everything that they may of before needed to contact HR for. It may not be suitable for smaller businesses as they may not need it's powerful functionality.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Workday Adaptive Planning is used across our entire organization. Department heads and brand presidents have access to track their financial data. In addition, we use Workday Adaptive Planning to create our budgets. Our marketing department uses the system to track their forecast.
  • Ease of use
  • User friendly
  • Financial modeling
  • Budgeting
  • System updates completed during budget season. This causes issues every year for us.
  • The system does not handle multiple exchange rates very well. This causes issues for the equity section of our balance sheet.
Workday Adaptive Planning is well suited for budget planning. This is one of our favorite uses for the system besides our monthly financial tracking.
Krishna Singh | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Workday Adaptive Planning was implemented for our organization 3 years back, and we support this now to help user adapt new upgrade and enhancement and much more. I worked and implemented many other planning systems for other client but I would say Workday planning is to implement if you have good knowledge on Adaptive and F,P & A process, its really helpful, easy, cost effective, and save lot of time.
  • I like the flexibility to create different sheets
  • I like the flexibility to create different dashboards
  • I like the flexibility to create reports
  • You can connect any system using integration
  • Easy to adapt and learn
  • cost effective
  • More you can focus on process then tool
  • I am completely satisfied that this tool can be used with either the smallest or largest organizations (yes, it's that good). as I worked on many other tool
  • the tree structure makes it very difficult to scroll through report
  • integrations between other system need to be streamline
Customisation of web pages and products - the Robust option enables us to manage many iterations, which we can then compare across multiple platforms with an ability to grow and differentiate, resulting in an expanded feature set of future scenarios.
Computer processing speed - With the Elastic Hypercube technology that was implemented a few years back, we can watch changes flow through a complex web of formulas and arrive at an answer within seconds.
continuous audit trail - One of the primary advantages of using Change Tracker is the real accountability that is displayed when seeing who has modified which files, which allows for an easy internal controls and auditing.
Marvin Hartsfield | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
[Workday Adaptive Planning is used] as the primary tool for budgeting and forecasting for the Finance department. Also used to track KPIs across the organization. All comparisons vs a budget are done with Adaptive.

Reporting is done using the office connect tool in both Excel and PowerPoint. Reporting is done from the board level to the individual department level.
  • Organizes a large amount of data in a very accessible way.
  • Easy to change or modify formulas
  • Easy to learn and implement.
  • Formatting and display options for dashboards are limited.
  • Scenario planning is hard to carry from one version to the next.
  • Reporting has limited formatting options.
Workday Adaptive Planning is extremely well suited to the typical finance budget, forecast, actual reporting cycle and makes it easy to do every monthly forecast at the same level of detail as an annual plan. It takes a lot of pain out of the reconciliation of headcount variances and that type of thing.
Tony Phan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Workday is used as the backbone of HR management in my organization. It is used from the day employee is hired till the day that employee resigns. Request for salary payment details are also being done here. In addition, development module is integrated with workday making it easy to set goals & achieve your goals through your career.
  • All in one portal related to HR details that you need to know in your organization.
  • Integrated goal/development feature that will help you in your career.
  • Requesting annual leave is extremely easy, no more emails requesting leaves.
  • Sometimes a lot of functions causing confusion, might need to set guide/help card for new employees to get used to.
I would absolutely recommend this to any of my colleagues. In fact, many of them are already using it. It is making HR related things in your organization so easy. From the stage that you are applying for the job (through Workday) to the day that you are onboarding and Workday will keep helping you throughout your journey in the organization that is using it.
April 16, 2021

Outsanding Solution!

Brad MacDonald | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As a growing company, we needed to shift from Excel-based budgeting/reporting models to a much more capable (and sophisticated) model. We selected Adaptive based on the tool's capabilities, the fact that it's cloud-based (SaaS), and easily scalable. We deployed Adaptive for all budget owners within 3 months of making our decision.

Using Adaptive, our budget owners and executives now have a much better (and faster) view of our financials, as well as allowing the finance team to spend time on analysis/insight.
  • Overall structure of the model is both powerful and simple. Accounts and levels (legal entities/cost centers) drive the overall data structure. Once this principle is firmly understood, the tool is quite easy to understand from an implementation and administrative perspective.
  • Customer support is outstanding. Even though we're a small company, Adaptive doesn't recognize that (or care). I've had conversations with a variety of their team members on a number of different topics, and they are very good at supporting our company.
  • Reporting tools are world-class. It's nice that you can have a best-in-class planning system, but without equally strong reporting tools, it really doesn't mean much. Adaptive's easy-to-build reports are both flexible and powerful.
  • Administration is easy. Helpful tools to make your system secure.
  • Our biggest challenge is that more people want the tool than we (originally) budgeted for. (This really isn't a con, but be aware that if you're moving from an Excel-based manual model, people will be really hungry for this type of tool/application.)
I am completely satisfied that this tool can be used with either the smallest or largest organizations (yes, it's that good).
Warren Sampson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Workday Adaptive Planning to create a detailed financial plan for our entire company. The userbase includes Sales, Operations, Finance, and HR. In addition to using Adaptive to develop a bottoms-up financial plan, starting with sales volume/revenue, detailed labor planning, cost of goods sold modeling, we use Adaptive to pull financial results from our ERP system (SAP) and report on Plan vs Actual performance.
  • Version Management. Adaptive lets us manage many versions/scenarios all in one platform with the robust ability to compare them to each other.
  • Processing Performance. With the Elastic Hypercube technology that was implemented a few years back, we can watch changes flow through a complex web of formulas and arrive at an answer within seconds.
  • Audit Trail. Our administrators love the ability to see and report on who made what changes when, which leads to real accountability within the organization.
  • Variable Time Roll-ups. Different entities within our company look at "years" differently, but we're only able to specify one global time roll-up for aggregating data quickly, which can lead to some confusion.
  • Administrative UI. Management of Access Rules and ordering sheets from an administrative point of view can be a bit tedious and have received less attention than other features recently.
  • List Sheet Reporting. Any sheet that is a variable list of things (like People, Capital Projects, Marketing Programs) is somewhat constrained in how it can be reported on. Adaptive provides two kinds of reports but both leave something to be desired when reporting on this kind of data.
Workday Adaptive Planning is an extremely flexible foundation to model almost anything. We've found ways to build detailed models that give the planners and management at the company valuable insights into how each department is planning for the future, thus providing management the information they need to shift course if necessary. Generally its reporting is robust but it's not a substitute for Business Intelligence tool.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use [Workday] Adaptive Planning for our yearly budget process and our monthly forecasting process. It allows our team great flexibility with both of these processes and has moved us out of the age of Excel and into a online Platform that helps eliminate data entry or formula errors. Not only can we report/forecast on GL balances we also have many custom accounts we do this process for as well. The ability to load detailed historical data is a great feature of this product as well.
  • Quick ability to update formulas and see the updated outcomes
  • Very nice to have ability to have multiple versions and compare them against each other
  • Love Office Connect, total game changer for Excel users
  • Need the ability to move items within Dashboards from tabs or even other Dashboards
  • More graphing abilities within Dashboard
  • Enhance Matrix Reporting
[Workday Adaptive Planning is] great for forecasting OPEX items in the banking industry but not so good for ALM items
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Workday Adaptive Planning is mostly used by our finance team. However we expanded it to accounting, the data BI team, investor relations, and budget owners. Finance uses it for its typical duties: balance sheet and income statement forecast, OPEX variances, headcount and req tracking, close and board meeting dashboards etc. Accounting uses it to view financial statements on the fly from different angles (by function, by location, department, etc.). The BI team pulls data to create advanced dashboards on their end. Budget owners can view their vendor forecast and spend, view their headcount, reqs, etc.
  • Ease of administration (one or two people can handle it versus a whole team plus IT)
  • Keep adding really cool features every quarter
  • Integration with Workday HCM
  • Integration and customization with ERPs, data warehouses, CRMs
  • Great customer support--very knowledgeable, efficient, friendly, and fast
  • Approachable staff--you can reach out easily to PMs and provide and get feedback
  • Office Connect became dynamic (updates of structure, drills, grouping, exclusions, etc.)
  • Data mapping feature to overlay or fix mappings from feeding sources
  • Small bugs after new releases (but always solved very fast)
  • Could use some enhancement on UI side (but they have great improvements on the roadmap)
  • Copy to or from sandbox is done via request to support; it would be great to have an automated, on-demand way by admins
I have been a user, then an admin, and then implementor of Workday Adaptive Planning. Some people are still stuck in an Excel mindset and can find it cumbersome in the beginning, but once they grasp the logic of Workday Adaptive Planning, they start to appreciate the ease of adding new data, adding new dimensions to slice and dice data better, and generating reports and dashboards super fast. It will make headcount and OPEX variance analysis way easier. You can create all kinds of dashboards for all kinds of audiences (non-finance people, budget owners, board, execs, HR, accounting, etc.). You can even set up separate instances for advanced revenue forecasting and advanced sales commissions planning. Integration with Workday HCM makes the whole headcount recon process a breeze (from a budgeted request to a hired employee). I'd conclude by saying that to get optimal results, advanced training of users and admins is the key.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Adaptive as our main reporting tool to create reports for senior management and the board of directors (Finance). Our budgeting tool to create the annual budget. Last year, we rolled out user licenses and budget managers were able to sign in to enter their own budgets and review reports (whole organization). Used for our quarterly and ongoing forecast updates, scenario analysis, GM analysis, and any ad-hoc reporting (finance).
  • Reports: Makes beautiful, reliable, and easy to run and customize reports in Office Connect.
  • Ability to run multiple complex scenarios and then easily produce reports comparing those scenarios.
  • Salary and headcount forecasting.
  • Foreign exchange: Works ok for the income statement, but the balance sheet has been a huge challenge and still has many issues.
  • Usability for end-users: Input sections are not clear and the only way to see roll-up is by running a report in a separate section.
A great budgeting tool. Once everything is up and running we really only need to add in any incremental changes from the previous year. The reporting tool Office Connect is the best I have ever used. Less appropriate for multi-currency, multi-entity organizations and there needs to be an easier way to receive user inputs.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use it across the company for budgets/forecasts. The department owner is responsible for entering their own budgets, aside from personnel, into the model. It replaced a system that did not work.
  • New hires.
  • Personnel planning.
  • Detailed expense planning.
  • Integrated balance sheet, income statement and cashflow.
  • Allocation functionality is cumbersome since every time you want to make a change you have to recreate the allocation (i.e. if you need to add or delete a dept in the allocation).
  • Whenever we go into a saved locked version, instead of being at the top level, the system opens the next time at the dept level, even if you have never opened any sheets at that dept.
It is working well for us so far. We implemented expenses in detail in the beginning and are now working through revenue/booking integration with NetSuite along with the integration with Workday for personnel.
March 11, 2021

Great planning tool!

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Adaptive Planning is used by FP&A for financial planning for the whole organization. It addresses the core business problem of having a single point of truth for financial and operational plans. It is dynamic and enables scalability as you refine the model to include more drivers. The real value comes from linking connecting models so a change in one part of the business automatically updates financial projections for a different function (i.e. hiring impacts tech costs).
  • Forecasting
  • Version control
  • Ease of use
  • API
  • Transactional models (i.e. performance limitations with mass data forecast models +1MM rows).
  • Management reporting allocations.
Adaptive is a fantastic tool for any company still in spreadsheets. The transition to the cloud is made easy by Adaptive and the time to value is relatively low. The real value becomes apparent once the foundational model is set and you build incremental, linked models in the cloud. Real-time updates will impact various parts of your financial forecast and the forecast cycle is greatly shortened. Adaptive is not as suited for big data models at this time but is making progress in supporting this type of forecasting.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The Adaptive Planning tool is been used by FP&A department & sales - FP&A use it for budgeting and forecasting purpose - Sales use to for QAM purpose.
It addresses mostly all the problems related to Headcount & other spend - like capacity planning, Allocations, productivity, retention, etc.
  • Versioning/scenario analysis - It is so easy to run scenario analysis and compare live the changes - And one can preserve the data for different scenarios and can compare any number of version against each other in minutes.
  • Formulae creation is so easy - everyone can work on Adaptive as it's more or less Excel - creating new accounts and writing formulas has never been this easy.
  • Very user friendly - It's very straightforward.
  • Actuals - if the company restate the actuals - and if that version is overly in the locked version - it changes the locked version id we updated the new actuals - It would be great if there is some way to preserve the forecast version without creating a new actual version.
  • The audit trail for the forecast changes - if that can be added it will be great.
  • Personnel sheet filters - it's very time consuming that we have to make the change and save it every time- before when we use the filter we use to get to that row/cell and still could see full sheet & were able to save after doing bunch of changes but this new way makes it mandatory to save after every change, very time consuming.
It's very well suited for almost any company - because it's like Excel you can create any model you like - the only caveat is you should know what you want very clearly - it's very dynamic.
The only place I would say it need work is the restatement of actuals - it changes any locked version using actuals as the overlay.
Dmitry Zaichenko, MBA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Columbia Helicopters utilizes Workday Adaptive Planning in all budgeting, forecasting, reporting, dashboarding, and financial analysis processes. We conduct monthly cost center reviews [and] quarterly reforecasts with department heads responsible for entering all changes. [The] system is easy to use and organization-wide adoption has been really smooth. Quarterly software updates have kept the software running while introducing new features both visual and technical.
  • Report creation and sharing is easy and quick.
  • Planning with multiple different dimensions, attributes and timeframes can be set up and compared seamlessly.
  • Automated actuals import is well developed and allows for more analytical work and not data input.
  • It is not a true BI solution.
  • Workflow feature needs improvement.
Workday Adaptive Planning is great for both top down and bottoms up planning. We are also able to set the time level granularity as well as GL account level to which we plan and roll up actuals for comparison. We use Workday Adaptive Planning for headcount, P&L, Cash Flow, BS and Dashboards along with all monthly, quarterly and yearly reporting.
October 13, 2020

Adaptive Insights Review

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Adaptive Insights is currently used in our finance department to help plan, budget, and forecast for our company. Ultimately, it helps us as we work with the business leaders to track expenses as they come in. We review expenses each month and compare our budgeted numbers to actual numbers with our business leaders to identify the reasons behind any variances.
  • It is much nicer than having Excel because you don't have to worry nearly as much about breaking formulas.
  • It enables analysts and business partners to plan together by both having access to the same numbers in the same software thus reducing confusion and helping to keep everyone on the same page.
  • It helps a lot with reporting and doing analyses on budgets vs. actuals.
  • I wish that there were a way to select multiple levels when viewing sheets instead of having to build a report.
  • It would be nice if there were slightly more access controls so that different analysts could see the headcount for their groups without giving them access to the entire company's headcount data.
Adaptive is great if you have been using Excel models as a small company, and you're looking for a software to help build financial models that can more easily grow with your company. It might not be the best option if you are an extremely large corporation as we've discovered that it can slow down substantially if sheets have too many rows. For example, if you are a company with several thousand employees, I don't think Adaptive is currently robust enough to support all of your data and planning.
February 07, 2020

Adaptive Insights

Jennifer Bradshaw | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Adaptive Insights, a Workday company as our budgeting - forecasting and financial reporting tool. Our financial analyst is the primary users of the system - they meet with department heads and enter any budgeting or forecasting information into the system. We use Adaptive Insights, a Workday company across the whole organization. We also use Adaptive Insights, a Workday company, as our financial reporting system. We export our financial results from our financial accounting system into Adaptive Insights, a Workday company, and use it to provide consolidated financial reporting.
  • Budgeting
  • Forecasting
  • Reporting
  • Changing the formatting
I like Adaptive Insights, a workday company as a budgeting and forecasting tool. I think, for the most part, the front-end interface is relatively user-friendly and easy to understand. Reporting seems to take some "advanced" user experience and seems complicated to use as an average day-to-day user. I find that if we need reports created or modified, we end up having to rely on our Adaptive expert.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Adaptive Insights for all of our reporting, budgeting, forecasting, and KPI needs. Currently, all of our Operations leaders, CFO, COO, Finance, Accounting, and some of our department heads are users of this tool. Adaptive Insights has allowed us to scale the business efficiently as well as distribute results in a timely and accurate manner. We've also been able to improve our accountability and drive towards our desired results.
  • Implementation through the 3rd party was quick, efficient, and cost-effective.
  • It's a very flexible tool and is very easily customized for our evolving needs.
  • An ability to customize standard sheet views such as fonts/size.
  • Promote and push the training before and during implementation.
I've been most impressed with the ability to customize structures and hierarchies, centrally plan drivers and formulas, make user edits, track progress, and distribute results. I'm a big fan of the built-in customized reporting both in the cloud-based tool and in Excel and PowerPoint. Security can be a little cumbersome especially when there are sensitive personnel data involved.
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