Workday Adaptive Planning in conjunction with Intacct accounting
Updated March 04, 2024
Workday Adaptive Planning in conjunction with Intacct accounting
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Workday Adaptive Planning
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.
- This allows us to be more future focused
- The reporting using Microsoft Excel is useful at times but also breaks regularly due to formula errors and updated CoA on the G/L.
- Allows more timely feedback through the system to the users
Workday is the only software system (outside of Excel) that has been used by Vera to do our planning and analysis. We have just opted to move to Workday Adaptive Planning for our accounting system, payroll, and supply chain with the hopes that it will make our planning that much better and more precise.
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?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of Workday Adaptive Planning go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Workday Adaptive Planning again?
Yes
Workday Adaptive Planning Feature Ratings
Planning, Alignment, and Use
We were able to implement a company wide requirement to answer any questions related to variances directly within the Adaptive platform for ease of use by budget owners as well as the FP&A department. Additionally, we were able to use Office Connect to build out reports and analytics for our board to easily see how we have done against prior months.
Adaptive made our planning process much more automated as well as easy to use. Budget owners are able to see expenses against their budgets in real time as we have our accounting ERP directly connected. The ability to directly input comments related to variances has streamlined the monthly review process for all budget owners.
Previously, we were utilizing spreadsheets to perform our annual budget. Utilizing Adaptive Planning has vastly streamlined our old process of using excel only and limited the chances of user errors.
Using Workday Adaptive Planning
30 - We have the head of each department (budget unit) with access to Adaptive. This access allows them to see in real time their data as well as add notes to any outliers in the differences between budget vs. actuals. We are able to see those notes in real time on the finance side and update our information accordingly, or follow up directly with the budget owner if additional information is needed.
4 - Our entire FP&A department has access from this capacity. Each of them analyze their own areas of the budget (some are assigned to clinics, field support, business units, etc) depending on their role and function. Each of these individuals regularly contribute to the analysis of the budget on a monthly basis.
- Real time information
- Allows budget owners to enter notes directly into the areas where expenses are not in line with the budget
- Easy to pull into office connect for board reporting.
- Locked certain areas of the budget to specific individuals
- Formulas we were able to create
Workday Adaptive Planning Implementation
- Third-party professional services
Cross Country Consulting
Yes - There were a lot of phases related to set up and integration as well as the chart of accounts. We implemented Adaptive first and then our accounting system. We ended up having to change up the chart of accounts in Adaptive due to changes needed in the accounting structure in our new accounting system. During the initial build out phase, there were multiple steps around getting our information into Adaptive and then designing the different functions and analyses we needed to have performed where we started building that into the platform.
Change management was a minor issue with the implementation - Getting department heads on board with the change in our budgeting process was the greatest impact on change management and early adaptation. Once we were able to start including comments directly into the system, made department heads buy into the process change big time. That was the biggest factor in getting other departments buy in to the new process for reviewing your expenses on a monthly basis.
- Chart of accounts
- Determining the proper work streams to include in Adaptive. This was all done from scratch.
- Timing