Workday Adaptive Planning Review
We use Workday Adaptive Planning mostly for our monthly and annual P/L planning. Recently, we started using model sheets for Capex cash …
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.
Recent Reviews
How Workday Adaptive Planning Differs From Its Competitors
Awards
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Popular Features
- Financial budgeting (171)9.090%
- Forecasting (166)8.787%
- Long-term financial planning (160)8.585%
- Management reporting (171)8.383%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
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Unavailable
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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Features
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Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
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
Workday Adaptive Planning Integrations
Workday Adaptive Planning Competitors
Workday Adaptive Planning Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | Apple iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Mobile Web |
| Supported Countries | United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and many more! |
| Supported Languages | English, 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.
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
| Consumers | 0% |
|---|---|
| Small Businesses (1-50 employees) | 0% |
| Mid-Size Companies (51-500 employees) | 60% |
| Enterprises (more than 500 employees) | 40% |
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(337)Attribute Ratings
- 7.7Likelihood to Renew
- 7.3Availability
- 9.1Performance
- 9Usability
- 8.1Support Rating
- 7.3Online Training
- 8.2In-Person Training
- 9.4Implementation Rating
- 8.2Configurability
- 8.6Product Scalability
- 8.2Ease of integration
- 6.4Vendor pre-sale
- 8.2Vendor post-sale
- 7.6Data Sources
- 7.5Data Sharing and Collaboration
- 8.2Professional Services
- 7.3Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Reviews
(1-3 of 3)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
March 28, 2024
Workday Adaptive Planning Review
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.
90%
9.0
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- Definitely a time saver
- Improves accuracy due to version control
We have reviewed the tools, it is still in infancy stage, not yet applicable to us until we better understand the capabilities.
Yes, we recently acquired a small number of plants and it was very easy to train new users and add new levels to the current version.
March 08, 2024
Adaptive review from a national nonprofit
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.
72%
7.2
14.285714285714286%
1.4
56%
5.6
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10.0
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- We've completely eliminated Excel in the budget cycle. I no longer have to consolidate 90 spreadsheets to get the organizational budget. Last minute changes are saved in Adaptive. With the audit feature, I can know who made what change and whether or not it was approved at the top level.
- KPI dashboards have lowered expenses as users have real-time information on their expense ratio for major events. We've been able to lower costs, increase gross revenue and net revenue all at the same time.
have not used these tools
Streamlined the planning process across 80 units - and provides real time updates to their plans year round.
My decision came down to Adaptive vs Host Analytics. Host made the claim that because their sheets were just like excel, you wouldn't need to learn any new commands. Rather, I thought that was a downside. I didn't want another glorified version of excel, I was looking for something different, something new. Adaptive had that. They were also far more willing to work with a nonprofit and become a partner, rather than just a vendor.
We already had real-time reports from our cloud-based accounting system, but their reporting system doesn't have the flexibility the Adaptive has, which is the major reason I purchased Adaptive. Complaints about our reports have stopped. I now get compliments on how easy and useful Adaptive is. I have 85 business units and 5 major departments that all have real-time access to budget to actual reports, group and personal dashboards.
Another feature we've been able to incorporate is actual P&L by business unit with a moving balance. Our accounting system didn't allow us to incorporate a non-financial number (beginning unit balance) into the accounting system. We could use it in a report, which ended up being a bit clunky. With Adaptive, we imported the beginning balance and now it calculates the P&L in every report. No more questioning the validity of the numbers. Everyone can see all the inputs and outputs and its impact on the bottom line.
Moving to Adaptive's real time reporting has freed up 1 week per month that we used to spend preparing 85 unit P&L reports. That's 3 months of time per year freed up to spend on more strategic issues.
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Business unit heads, state chapter offices, accounting and finance
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accounting background and comfort with software and programming languages to build models and reports
- annual budgeting
- cash forecasting
- variance reporting
- personnel forecasting
- reporting by custom levels or custom accounts
Did not purchase. I use an outside workday approved consulting firm.
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February 26, 2024
Workday Adaptive Planning – It’s Versatile!
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.
86%
8.6
80%
8.0
86%
8.6
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8.3
93.33333333333334%
9.3
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- Streamlined planning process.
- Reduced time in reporting through automation.
- The ability to create versions.
I have not used these tools in depth. AI and ML are two areas that Workday is focusing a lot on in the past releases of new functionality. I think our organization will start to use them in the near future. We expect that the tools will help catch errors and improve our review.
Workday Adaptive Planning is centrally used in FP&A at this time. Therefore it hasn't hit many business processes outside of finance. As it relates to finance, Adaptive has helped improve processes around inputting data and reporting on that data efficiently for both budgets and forecasts. The review process for reporting and forecasting has also greatly improved.
I haven't used a separate planning tool in great depth like Adaptive. Our company used Host Analytics prior to Adaptive but I didn't have a lot of experience with it. The other software I've used for planning is Excel. Excel is obviously capable of a lot of complex lookups and calculations but it comes with plently of limitations.
We focus on a centralized planning team, so others outside of finance don't use Adaptive. I believe Adaptive has great tools to allow enterprise-wide planning, but I can't speak on how well it works. The tools we use for workforce, revenue, and operational planning do work really well for our purposes.
We perform a monthly reforecast using Adaptive and it works well for our strategy. We generate the forecast using different types of sheets and at times use planning dashboards to streamline that process. We are then able to publish the plans to workday to allow those forecasts to reach the business.
We used Miscrosoft Excel prior to Adaptive Planning. The transition has improved our processes massively. We're able to plan TOGETHER instead of in silos. This makes it easier to communicate on the same page. The reporting functionality has been hugely impacted as well. It takes a matter of minutes to generate a deck where it took hours prior to having Adaptive.
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Operations, Back Office, Maintenance, Supply Chain, Revenue
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Data-driven, problem-solver, general curiosity about finance systems, accounting and finance knowledge base are all valuable skill sets to keep in mind when supporting Adaptive.
- Using the tool to be able to generate ad-hoc forecasts and plans
- Using Adaptive for monthly reporting and budget deck preparation
- Ability to generate flexible plans and change assumptions on the fly if needed
- We've started to use it to generate a statement of cash flow
- We use it to store a lot of our debt information to feed reporting and our plan
- We've utilized dimensionality in unique ways to assist in easy planning/maintenance
- Forecasted Cash Flow
- Improved Tracking of CapEx
- More in depth modeling of Personnel
- Implemented in-house
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Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled
We learned that extra communication about the changes that were taking place was necessary. With all of our department keeping very busy, it was essential to take extra steps to make sure the changes taking place were understood by all.
- Integrating the data with Workday was time-consuming simply based on how different the two systems were at the time of our implementation.
- Recognizing that some of our Workday data was messy made it difficult to complete work timely.
- Integrating with large databases ended up failing because it was slowing down Adaptive. Adaptive planners will tell you that Adaptive is a planning tool, not a database.
We did not purchase premium support. The support we receive from the Adaptive support team has been solid!
No
I won't list any specific examples, but generally when I reach out to support they do a great job of doing research if they don't know the answer off-hand. I always feel valued when reaching out to support and the service has been fantastic.
- Workday
- RAMCO
- Sabre
- Adaptive
- Spreadsheets
The integration of Workday to Adaptive and vice versa was straight-forward to set up through Adaptive's user-friendly interface. It took careful following of documentation produced by Workday. The Workday integration was setup and owned by finance which allows us to easily make changes as needed. RAMCO and Sabre required the help of our IT integration group, but from an Adaptive set up perspective it was still owned by finance. We also user boomerang logic to have the Adaptive integration bring in data from Adaptive and then send it back in. Lastly we use spreadsheets to upload data to the integration. Both Adaptive and spreadsheet data sources were easy to achieve.
- PowerBI
To my knowledge, PowerBI is not supported.
- File import/export
- Single Signon
- API (e.g. SOAP or REST)
- Javascript widgets
- ETL tools
To my knowledge, the list is complete.
From the perspective of a person with finance and accounting background, my advice would be to not get freaked out when hearing the word integration if you're going to be someone who helps manage this product (assuming you purchase it). The integration framework is logical and makes sense. Building out tables and loaders actually become an enjoyable task after you have the data connection working as it should. Have fun with it!