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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

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  • Financial budgeting (171)
    9.0
    90%
  • Forecasting (166)
    8.7
    87%
  • Long-term financial planning (160)
    8.5
    85%
  • Management reporting (171)
    8.4
    84%

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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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 8.1

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 7.7

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 8.1

Financial Reporting and Compliance

Financial statements and regulatory filings

8.5
Avg 8.3

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

(1-25 of 90)
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Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Workday Adaptive Planning mostly for our monthly and annual P/L planning. Recently, we started using model sheets for Capex cash spend tracking. Workday has helped with version control which is crucial with over 50+ users.
  • Version Control
  • Import of transactions and importing data is straight forward and fast. Split accounts also allow user to improve accuracy.
  • Admin has control over design and layout of sheets instead of IT.
  • Text field from spilt accounts does not migrate into office connect. For example: Capex account: Capacity, free text field: 4 fork lifts, Timespan: April, Total: $160k. Officeconnect can only show Account, Timespan and Total. IE Capacity, April, $160k.
  • Scenario can only merge to base version. Cannot merge into different version.
Scalability, multiple levels can allow multiple users to access sheets. Security is hard to manage. For example, if we want some users to have access to certain sheets only, not able to set this up.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We purchased Adaptive Insights three months ago and are currently still in the implementation phase. We have our PnL currently up and running but it is our intention to build a full three statement model in Adaptive. The very intuitive interface allowed us to progress quickly with the implementation. At this moment all of our users are from the local finance teams but as we progress with the roll-out of our functional budgeting we will give other departments viewing and reporting access as well.
  • A very intuitive solution from a budget contributor point of view. The sheets are clean and the drag and drop functionalities make it easy to get started.
  • The many different custom dimensions and attributes make it easy to slice and dice the data to your liking.
  • The Adaptive logic is different than the Excel logic so it does require you to revise your current Excel models to bring them onto the platform.
  • We are still trying to figure out if, and how easy it is to bring more complex models to Adaptive (predictive modeling, Monte Carlo simulations etc).
I believe Adaptive Insights is a great solution to make your overall budgeting and planning process more structured, efficient, and less error-prone. The sheets are clean and easy to get started. Version control is a big advantage compared to regular excel files. The workflow planning allows you to assign specific tasks to different users to keep track of your overall budgeting cycles. What we have not implemented yet are more sophisticated predictive models like regression models and/or Monte Carlo simulations. We are still trying to figure out what the possibilities withing Adaptive are.
Daniel Killpack | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Adaptive across the entire organization, which includes 5 major departments and 85 business units/chapters. We plan each year in Adaptive and track and manage expenses. We use Discovery to monitor KPIs. Before Adaptive, everything was in spreadsheets that had to be consolidated by hand. Before Adaptive generating the monthly reports for each unit took 1 week per month, or 3 months of the year. Now, all financial information is available instantly. Better access to information and KPIs has allowed us to lower our expenses and increase revenue. All the grumbling about budget season has stopped and I'm actually hearing people say that they "love Adaptive."
  • Discovery - monitoring KPIs. The new Discovery interface is the easiest dashboard I've ever used. I can have a new report on a Dashboard in under a minute.
  • Reporting - the click and drag graphical user interface makes it easy to design reports to answer almost any financial question. It also makes it easy to adapt a single report for 100 different users.
  • Planning - having multiple versions and multiple levels allows us to compare, contrast, monitor and manage with ease.
  • The in-house consultants who originally set up Adaptive were poor listeners - and as a result built a model that didn't work for my organization. I had to hire an outside consulting firm with more experience with nonprofits to redo my model. I lost about 1 year of usefulness as a result.
  • Mastering attributes for reporting takes time. The system can do many things, but not without lots of time and effort. I ended up hiring a consultant to build initial reports I needed. I'm comfortable enough now to edit and update, but still have some hesitancy building new reports. One difficulty I have is not knowing the impact a single change, such as the name of a field, can have on everything else associated with that named field or dimension or attribute. It would be nice to have a map showing the links between everything.
Well suited: to plan multiple budgets that roll up into a single organizational budget; planning alternate scenarios, reporting by multiple user defined parameters; rolling budgets; rolling forecasts, tracking KPI, visual dashboards. Not as well suited for: neophyte programmer, software is complex and difficult to set up. Once it's set up it's much easier to use, however single changes can have multiple domino effects on other reports or sheets, or dashboards.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Workday Adaptive Planning to help understand our spend across the company by GL code as reported via Netsute. Though not perfect, the tool allows me to segregate this spend and extract insights by comparing against time, Dept. and other variables. This is best done by extracting via Excel and manipulating the data there.
  • Summarize data.
  • Clean layout.
  • Aggregate across sources.
  • Ease of use.
  • Robustness.
  • Data dynamism.
Best suited if it is complementing NetSuite source data, not great as the sole platform for BI in spend searchable by specific variables. Also, this should be expected to be used as a data repository, not really to manipulate. For this, you will need outside tools. For small orgs, should be be fine, for larger remits, suggest looking at dedicated platforms.
Brian Goldrick | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Workday Adaptive Planning is being used by our entire company. The admins of the system are on the financial planning and analysis team. Each budget owner goes in to fill out their department's budget first, which is then reviewed by the FP&A team/CFO and there are typically three iterations of going back and forth on the requested options. This is way better than how we previously budgeted, which was on an Excel spreadsheet.
  • Forecasts very easily
  • Setting up formulas to auto populate certain areas makes it much easier for budget owners to fill it out.
  • Collaboration between the FP&A team as well as the budget owners is all done within Workday Adaptive Planning rather than through team messages or emails. Much more efficient.
  • There have been some issues with the mapping between Workday Adaptive Planning and our accounting system, Intacct, that has required additional support beyond what we were able to do in house.
  • Some of the formulas break due to budget owners not knowing what they are doing. This has been fixated with updates to Workday Adaptive Planning over the years but it still pops up every once in a while.
  • Better reporting functionalities.
I think the system has come a long way in the 4+ years we have used it and it continues to get better and better with each update that comes out. I think there are still some areas for improvement (reporting, locking down cells, etc.), but overall I would recommend this to colleagues.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Workday Adaptive Planning for budget and forecast planning, reporting (utilizing both web and office connect excel reports), and analytics. The system is primarily used by finance now, until we role it out to other departments in our business; which we’ve already begun to do. With Workday Adaptive Planning we are able to compile large amounts of data from the bottoms up but also have the flexibility of modeling at a high level. The system is versatile and can be used for not only financials, but headcount, and performance data as well.
  • Creation of Versions.
  • Reporting and Dashboarding.
  • Model Flexibility.
  • Web reports within Dashboard would be great.
  • Version to Version referencing within model formulas.
  • Calculations within reports that allow you to add data across different versions.
Workday Adaptive Planning is well suited for building plans from the bottom up and involving other departments within your business. You can set up processes that allow you to track from within the system, the progress of the departments and imputing the data that’s required. The system is less appropriate for static planning, as the system is suited to be used for active planning and forecasting.
Jack Kersjes | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it for financial statements, budgeting, forecasting, and other operational reporting. We also use the dashboard for both financial and operational data. It is used by our executives and all our department directors. It has greatly streamlined our budgeting, forecasting, and financial reporting processes. Additionally, the dashboard provides a means to communicate KPIs in an efficient manner.
  • Financial Reporting - financial statements are done instantaneously once the books are closed. There is no processing required. Recipients of the reports can obtain everything they need self-service. There is no distribution process required.
  • Budgeting/forecasting - We converted our Excel process (which used 30 linked workbooks, 20 sheets each, and 50+ formulas each sheet, for a total of 30,000 formulas) to Adaptive. Now that the model is set up, new forecasts can be set up in minutes, rather than hours/days. The whole model is driver-based and easy to manage. It is much more intuitive for our directors, too. All they need to supply are updated drivers to run a new budget or forecast.
  • Dashboard - We now have a company-wide mechanism for communicating KPIs, and both financial and non-financial data. Data can be presented both visually or in numeric formats.
  • The Adaptive Planning portion of the suite is very mature and has few short-comings. The biggest improvement I can think of is the ability for formulas to cross versions.
  • The Adaptive Discovery (dashboard) portion of the suite is much less mature. There are many chart types not available that are in Excel. For example, I would like to have an X-Y scatter chart to use. Also, some of the dial (chart) types have very little formatting options (like pie charts).
  • While the object of the web-based product is to eliminate paper printing, there are times when it is necessary to print financial statements. It would be nice to print directly to pdf with the ability to format the reports.

Adaptive is well suited to present data (both financial and non-financial) in the form of financial statements, reports, budgets, forecasts, and dashboards to a distributed audience. That is, any data that can be accessed, and then summarized and presented for analytical and reporting purposes. The web-based platform allows for end-user access anywhere.

Where it is less appropriate, and often mistakenly so by those not directly involved in administering the product, is to try to use it as a replacement for an operational database and operational report writer. For example, in a SQL database, it would be better to write operating level reports directly in that database as SQL reports.

Gajendra Kumar Gangwar | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We were capable to onboard departmental budgets accessible to users on the cloud instead of using the excel sheets. We able to extend our vision and helped the account managers to keep them updated, save time and use the budget with less manual efforts. It also helped to manage the spending and project the budget.
  • It is very powerful while someone would like to work on multiple sheets together.
  • We can also integrate or we can say copy the data from external excel sheets which makes life easy.
  • It is also very helpful for planning without affecting the organizational budget for every department. It is very easy to use and manage.
  • There are some limitations of this tool as well and personally I didn't like the way it restrict us to change the sheet frequently, it can be lead to wrong calculations for monthly or quarterly planning.
  • This is also not much flexible, it should have integration mechanism to connect with other tools and data accessibility too.
  • Sometimes we also faced the slowness issue while performing complex task. This can be improved.
This is very easy to setup for new members, also very easy to understand and powerful to generate reports based on this we can recommend it. Performance and limitations sometimes creates problem and can lead us to wait for few times.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Adaptive Insights for mainly budgeting purposes and running monthly budget vs actual reports. It has helped the company dramatically with ensuring that we are using the correct and same version of the approved budget. We have 27 different entities creating budgets and within those entities up to 80 different departments. Before Adaptive Insights, there were a lot of Excel spreadsheets emailed back and forth. This created issues with version control. Adaptive Insights has also forced the company across all entities to map their chart of accounts in a similar fashion and use accounts for the same purpose.
  • It does well with version control. I can ensure that all 27 entities know exactly which version is the correct budget that is approved.
  • It does well with scenario planning. I can easily make adjustments with to the budget whether that is pushing sales, expenses, headcount, or capital projects.
  • It does a good job with enforcing unity with the chart of accounts.
  • It does permissions for different groups well.
  • It did reporting groups and distribution well.
  • There has been a real lack of training. This has caused issues especially with creating new reports.
  • There could be better shortcut keys similar to Excel.
  • There could be a better search functionality with the self tutorial area.
It works well with budgeting across large organizations. It helped with version control of the budget/forecast. There was a clear understanding around which the approved and default versions were. It enforced a set chart of accounts. It required the various groups across the organization to conform to be on the same page. It was easy to create a new budget/forecast version, distribute it to the organization, and track their progress.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Adaptive as our system of record planning and reporting application. The FP&A team is the primary editor of information, but read-only information is widely consumed across the org.
  • Excellent documentation with articles and videos.
  • Strong implementations network of consultants.
  • Accessible staff for Q&A (like formulas Friday and other weekly sessions).
  • Being cloud only, occasionally the model may be slow to load or update.
  • Certain features like user assigned sheets are edit only or no access (no read-only access).
  • Dimension level security is coming in a future release (Fall 2019).
  • Cannot have multiple security profiles per user (one profile per account).
Adaptive is great for lining up multiple version (variance analysis) and a nice mix of structure and flexibility. We still maintain some more complex models outside of the system in Excel and application scripts like cohort models.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Adaptive Insights is used globally within Finance and within each department. Adaptive Insights addressed the issue of efficiency, user error, real-time data, and the ability to stop being so reliant on Excel spreadsheets.
  • Adaptive is a cloud-based system that allows our users to interact with Finance from anywhere in the world.
  • Office Connect is a great add-on to Excel that allows us to set-up reports and refresh them in an instant for more detailed information needed throughout the company.
  • The report section is great but it doesn't quite give you the flexibility that Office Connect (Excel Add-On) does.
Adaptive Insights is well-suited for companies that operate with budgets that have multiple components and complex calculations.
Brandon Gappa | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are working towards Adaptive Insights being the single source of truth for Financial Reporting within the Comcast Technology Solutions by combining Business Data to drive forecasting. We were the first group within Comcast to implement Adaptive. There are other instances that are currently being launched as well.

Right now it is primarily the FP&A team that makes changes, and for revenue, for we have business operations partners that input their customer revenue forecast.

We previously were using Essbase to do all of our planning, but the CTS group operates quite differently compared to the rest of Comcast. Imagine operating a startup inside a cable box. Adaptive gives us the flexibility to make detailed changes to our business units and accounts quickly and have immediate reporting results. As opposed to keeping track of detailed Essbase strings, making changes and then waiting every two hours to make sure they were made correctly.
  • Live Reporting - The ability to constantly see your change impacts, using the Audit Trail to identify the users making the change, and transaction details for actual significantly freed up valuable bandwidth to spend more time on forecast accuracy.
  • Flexibility to change Business Structure and have those changes flow through historically without any effort. Used to have various Xref files everywhere.
  • Corporate Consolidation - Being able to have multiple Organizations roll up into a group that is not managed by us. We still need to use export into Essbase for our HQ partners until Adaptive can fully integrate the two seamlessly.
  • Web Reporting can be inflexible at times, especially when it comes to notes. Office Connect helps to fill that gap, but we would rather use web reporting when we can.
I will never work for an FP&A Organization again if they do not have Adaptive Insights. It's that great of a product. Previously an FP&A Analyst had to be graded based on how quickly they could operate Microsoft Office, and how well they understood how their business works through manual processes. Now with so much of time being taken care of by Adaptive we can really shine and build better relationships with the business and dig deeper into Business questions.

This results in way more value being added to our Partners. Gone are the days of breaking links and passing around multiple templates for input from the business, they know have live information right after it becomes available.

Traning fresh analysts in Adaptive is a much simpler process than going through old excel templates that constantly were changing for business needs. Not to mention if you make a change and want to compare to historical reporting you would need to go and update a file that nobody has touched in months/years.

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