Adaptive review from a national nonprofit
Updated March 08, 2024
Adaptive review from a national nonprofit
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Workday Adaptive Planning
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.
- 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.
Do you think Workday Adaptive Planning delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Workday Adaptive Planning's feature set?
Yes
Did Workday Adaptive Planning live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Workday Adaptive Planning go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Workday Adaptive Planning again?
Yes
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.
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.
Workday Adaptive Planning Feature Ratings
Using Workday Adaptive Planning
100 - Business unit heads, state chapter offices, accounting and finance
2 - 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
Workday Adaptive Planning Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required | None |
Did not purchase. I use an outside workday approved consulting firm.