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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)
    8.3
    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

(1-25 of 161)
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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.
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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our company's core financial forecasting is done in Adaptive, integrated with our Workday FINS platform for our GL. Adaptive is the key component in our financial and company performance forecasting. We were coming off of homebuilt and manual planning tools, and the shift has made us a lot more responsive to the changing environment of the last 3 years. Executive team trusts the results, and is confident that we have the tools we need to provide insights.
  • Our annual budgeting and forecasting process at a company and cost center level
  • integration with Workday FINS is seamless
  • Integration with Excel is a huge bonus and really where our users spend the most time.
  • We don't know what we don't know...more training on specific use cases would have expanded our use of the tools
  • There is certainly a cost associated with it, we're glad we have the combined package with Workday
  • The tool has its own language and lexicon, and you have to adapt (no pun) to it
The seamless integration to the general ledger is really helpful in creating cost center and company level forecasts. The planning team loves the tie in to Excel for day-to-day use. Go live was seamless, as we were going live with a FINS-first implementation at the same time. We are using it every month to update the outlook, as well as for the annual budgeting cycle.Adaptive is the key component in our financial and company performance forecasting. We were coming off of homebuilt and manual planning tools, and the shift has made us a lot more responsive to the changing environment of the last 3 years. Executive team trusts the results, and is confident that we have the tools we need to provide insights.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Workday Adaptive Planning for our budgets and forecasts that end up back in Workday Finance. We also integrate Actuals from Workday Finance, HCM, and other software to create comprehensive analytics and reports.
  • Better than Excel for multi-faceted planning.
  • Allows real-time collaboration, analytics, and reporting.
  • Gives power users the flexibility to create their own planning models.
  • Allows integration of multiple different data sources.
  • Web reports and sheets are not great for in-depth reporting, and require the use of the OfficeConnect for Excel plugin and, therefore, the use of Excel for extensive reporting capabilities.
  • It has limited formula functionality in some instances, requiring again the use of OfficeConnect for Excel for extensive calculations.
  • I would like to see new planning sheet types or upgrades to existing sheet types; functionality has been the same for over 10 years.
Adaptive is much more versatile than most planning software, and in most ways better than Excel for planning and analytics. It is great and bringing together data from multiple sources, especially if on the Workday platform, and really allows your team to collaborate in real time without any issues unlike trying to work in Excel workbooks at the same time or needing an adminstrator to enter data for you. Power users can even update models and reports themselves and share with others. The flexibility of designing your own models is also great in allowing you to plan however granular you need and have different methods of planning for different business units but bring it all together consolidated.The reporting is the least useful feature. Yes, OfficeConnect gives you all the power of Excel and PowerPoint and is great if you can utilize it, but for now it only works on Windows when many businesses have shifted to Apple or Google platforms. Also, OfficeConnect is not fast or easy to use, like the web reports and web dashboards, which are great for quick ad-hoc reports but not great for presentation-level reports. This creates a huge disconnect in the quickness of analytics, if you want to run and show in depth analytics you'll need OfficeConnect due to the limited functionality and limited formula capabilites of Adaptive web reports which requires someone to build and maintain and refresh the OfficeConnect reports which is slow and not easily shared with other users.Also the planning functionality of the 3 sheet types have not been updated in years. Some new features or sheet types would be greatly appreciated.
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.

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Workday Adaptive Planning is used to plan and maintain financial forecasts and spending during ongoing R&D projects. It is kept up to date with budget allocations, forecast changes, and most immortally it helps us to smartly track remaining budget to make sure we are within our allocation. Once the project is finalised, it is also used to track revenue generation.
  • Financial analysis
  • User friendliness
  • User interface
  • More instructional demos on different utilities
  • More flexibility on custom set ups
  • Info button to understand what some statically tools depict
We found it very good for budget tracking, assigning budget and making sure we are within it. It works less well when you have multiple requirements within the same budget i.e. budget allocation management and new revenue incoming from a project in addition to revenue forecasting, these things should mesh together a bit better.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As an organization that represents over 230,000 members, we are using Adaptive Insights to generate reports that provide transactions and more drill down reports by department and sub categories across the entire organization. This enables all departments to review their budget at any time without waiting for the monthly reports to be distributed. In addition, this helps eliminate human errors as we are able to pull the reports and drill down to the exact transactions to review and confirm that they are coded correctly. We like that the system is web-based - accessible from anywhere as long as you have internet access. The only setback is our staff travel expenses are generated separately - not sure the reasoning behind that action.
  • Web-based system which eliminates the need to purchase new software. System is accessible anywhere as long as there is internet access.
  • Its features provide for good planning, budgeting, and forecasting.
  • The ability to create customized reports is a very nice touch - we are able to share this across our organization.
  • The drill down details are very helpful in confirming expenses.
  • The layout of the various reporting options could be displayed in a more user-friendlier way. It's a bit difficult to locate where to find the reports.
  • I'm finding that the drill down feature from the monthly financials section is not as convenient as it should be.
  • The exporting to Excel or PDF format is a bit off - it's time consuming to manipulate the excel to a regular paper size.
  • A tutorial on how to create different reports for different end users would be helpful.
Adaptive Insights is well suited for many business sizes, including small companies to companies with billions of dollars in revenue. Its flexibility with customization and the various options is very attractive. The ability to have the data in real time is much appreciated. We are heavily reliant on allowing those authorized to run their own reports, eliminating the middle man.
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.
Leonardo Cordero | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Adaptive is our main tool to prepare/review and analysis our final figures between Actual/Currently scenario vs Budget vs Outlook
  • Analysis of PL data by segments
  • Improve our Business Partner support to review the data
  • Prepare the data to extract, load and upload PL by Region
  • Opex analysis
  • Budget process
  • Allocation expenses
  • Forecast data
Allow us to load actual data to validate and makes / prepares the analysis data
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Workday adaptive planning helps manage business of all sizes by providing analytical insights, forecasts and reports that help take business decisions with ease. It does not depend on shifting business needs or use of legacy software's and provides help in complex planning. One can track EBITA, growth, performance and other key performance metrics and is easy to integrate with CRM, ERP and BI solutions.
  • It helps create dynamic plans for finances, operations and various functional units in an organization all under one platform
  • It helps in scenario modeling to help analyze various business events and report by any number of business dimensions including channel, customer or product
  • It can be integrated with any system including ERP, BI or CRM
  • For complex KPI, it takes times in case the dataset is huge and can lead to business disruptions if not done in real time
  • It cannot be shared with new individuals or stakeholders who were not initially added to a particular plan
  • Plans cannot be shared easily over mail and require third party integrations
It can be best suited in scenarios which require multi dimensional modelling and reporting and more simpler and granular metrics need to be tracked. It also helps assess various what if scenarios to evaluate scope of business opportunities and help stakeholders take business decisions. One can create plans aligned with various organizational and business unit goals by collaborating with all kinds of department and users in organization.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Workday is used by our entire company to manage and handle all aspects of Human Resources, Budgeting, Individual Goals, Training, and keeping track of each individual learning and courses they have taken. From an HR management standpoint, it is the backbone of our company.
  • Keeps everything HR and Team management wise in one place
  • Excellent and easy to use layout and user interface
  • It's very easy to navigate and find your way around even for first time users
  • Requires minimal training to get up and running
  • Sometimes it can be a little difficult to find smaller details within the software that you might be looking for
  • Can be a little overwhelming to those that are just looking to use one particular function
Thanks to Workday our company now has one solid and robust HR package that governs all things HR in one platform in one cloud-based system. It's very easy to use and navigate and helps individual users all the way up to our top executives manage tasks related to their job easily and efficiently. It effectively helps all employees manage their goals quarterly and provides an excellent tool to receive and give feedback along with assisting managers in reviews of those individuals. From a company-wide perspective, it's been a great budgeting tool and has been extremely helpful with our long-term financial planning and analysis.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Adaptive Planning is a scalable FP&A tool that allows the company to make adjustments to budgets and forecasts with speed and efficiency. Instead of creating numerous excel files, Adaptive Planning has live cases of forecasts, budgets, and actuals. It is sheet based like Excel, but you can also use to plan all of your financial statements.
  • Headcount Planning
  • Expense Forecasting
  • Software Amortization Schedule
  • The more dimensions you add, the slower the software becomes.
  • Not many great training tools for newer users
  • Tracing formulas between sheets is not the best
Whether you are headcount planning, expense planning, etc. Once the product is implemented, Adaptive Planning is powerful to use. Teammates can collaborate together in making adjustments to formulas and forecasts, and you can compare different versions/scenarios of different forecasts. It's also very easy to import sheets and dimensions as their templates are clear to use.
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
Workday Adaptive Planning is used for Financial Planning and Reporting activities. Workday Adaptive Planning is being used across the whole organization . Every cost center manager prepares an annual plan within Adaptive Planning.The FP&A team is the primary editor of information, but read-only information is widely consumed across the org. It helps in dynamic planning through collaboration across the team during planning. Adaptive Planning is also valuable for forecasting.
  • Eliminates the need for Spreadsheet with far better collaborative feature
  • Excellent User interface and ease of usage.
  • Great analytics and charting. It stores historical information and is valuable for forecasting and comparing with historical data.
  • Excellent tool to create dynamic models for budgets and forecasts that can connect directly to financials.
  • Trend Analysis
  • This being a SAAS Solution , sometimes the models are slow to update and load
  • The search functionality can be improved with some user friendly tutorials.
  • Not sure if it supports shortcuts like Excel. Seasoned excel users would like to have similar shortcuts.
  • Documentation and training can be improved , specifically around creation of complex models and integration with other tools.
Adaptive Planning is user friendly and the screens are easy to navigate. It doesnt take much time or training to get started. Its ability to model and budget off KPIs and build department-specific budgets is very useful. It's relatively easy to add new models or forecasts to the instance. The workflow planning allows you to assign specific tasks to different users to keep track of your overall budgeting cycles. Version control is a big advantage compared to the excel sheet.
As the system grows, sometime the time to load and update model increases. There is room for improvement on customization of reports.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have multiple units that need to be budgeted on an annual basis. Each of these entities is responsible for their own budgets using some assumptions driven by corporate. At the end of the process, it all has to be pulled together. Previously, using Excel, this was at least a full day process, with similar turnaround times every time something was changed at the base level. Now that process takes minutes.
  • It is one database, so there is no pulling together or consolidating of data
  • It allows for structural changes to be made such that if a corporate decision is made that impacts everyone, or even a segment of the units, the change can easily be made in minutes
  • At the end of the process, often times we will want to dig into the numbers, and possibly change some, based on how they all roll up. Previously, this was an Excel nightmare. Now it is instant and seamless.
  • Discovery provides an "at your fingertips" display of every KPI that you can dream up, as well as trends, breakdowns, and projections that are driving or being driven by those indicators.
  • I would like to see the ability to completely turn off all calculations for a budget version, such that it is locked down, and would require an act of Congress to change a number. We have had a few cases where something was inadvertently changed AFTER the budget was finalized.
  • The ability to back-up an entire budget would be helpful (see the comment above).
Anyplace where Excel is used as a primary budgeting tool, and there are multiple inputs/locations to that process, Adaptive will be able to make the process smoother. This is particularly the case when the units are spread out, and not on the same internal network. We have saved a ridiculous amount of time by using Adaptive.
August 01, 2022

Acquire Adaptive!

Martin Davila | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In my organization, Adaptive Insights is used by managers only and some other workers at the second level. The only issue we currently have is that the data is uploaded manually, therefore, the other users don’t have the information updated real time.
  • User-friendly
  • It empowers users to work on their own
  • It makes it easy to view and create online reports
  • The option of a template is very important for the personalization of reports
  • None
It’s well suited for strategic planning and financial management. It’s less appropriate for statistics.
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
Workday is a wonderful product that is very intuitive for the end user and for core HCM. Adaptive, Workforce Planning, Recruiting is where Workday falls down. What it does, and it does it well, is truly capacity planning, top-down, and not true Strategic Workforce Planning as described by the ISO standard or those organizations who excel at it. It can be modified to do those things with the use of a data lake and additional fulfillment modeling code. However, it still would struggle to fully integrate procurement (contingent labor and SOW labor), Industry X.O, Future Workforce, and external econometric data into the models.
  • Capacity Planning.
  • Financial Forecasting.
  • Strategic Workforce Planning.
  • Future Workforce.
  • Fulfillment Modelling.
As previously stated, it is best suited for annual capacity planning and short-term transactional workforce planning.
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.
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.
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