Workday Adaptive Planning is the future of budgeting!
December 28, 2024

Workday Adaptive Planning is the future of budgeting!

Danielle Arnold | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Workday Adaptive Planning

We use Workday Adaptive Planning for our yearly budget process and some reporting. Workday Adaptive Planning allows our users to make budget changes and see the net result of the changes immediately. This helps to get us to our target budget more quickly. We plan to utilize the active dashboards within Adaptive for even more real-time data and how it affects the overall organization.

Pros

  • It's ability to update and process changes to accounts or formulas immediately across multiple sheets
  • The ability to link accounts to a summary page makes data easier to pull to different sheets
  • The flexibility with different sheets and the security to allow or not allow visibility

Cons

  • Having an Average function in the formula types, currently I have to use a range and divide by that number
  • Ability to delete data in Standard account boxes from one version to another, rather than having to manually delete
  • Working with teams that implement Adaptive to ensure they are setting up the model for ease of using the Publish Plan functionality
  • Cut our budget season from over 2 months down to less than a month
  • Use of one system has saved time for our leaders
  • Ability to use forecasts and scenarios has made decision-making much cleaner and faster
I have played around a bit with predictive forecaster but need to do more work there. I haven't used anomaly detection or outlier reporting yet, but plan to implement as many helpful tools that Workday Adaptive Planning has to offer for our 2026 budget season. I know there are many things within Adaptive that I just haven't had the time to research or test.
It has significantly reduced the amount of time we spend building our budget. We used to spend months creating and making edits to the budget. This year we had a much-reduced timeline and we able to have our budget ready to go almost 2 weeks ahead of that deadline! Our goal is to have minimal edits in the coming years where we can basically just calculate our estimated expenses increase as well as our workload increase. The flexibility with formulas in Adaptive is amazing, you can basically get whatever you want to calculate using formulas.
I think it is very reminiscent of Excel, which I like. The formula writing is a little different but somewhat easier than with Excel for the most part. I think that navigation is what most of our leaders have difficulty with, just because we did add an extra sheet for them to reference, which ended up being a hinderance. We're only on our 2nd year of budgeting with Workday Adaptive Planning, but saw a vast improvement with engagement from our leaders and most had little to no difficulty getting to where they needed to be to enter/adjust accounts.
  • Kaufman Hall Healthcare & Higher Education Consulting Services
Like I said in a previous question, the fact that there was downtime that was needed to update all the data that was entered in a day was not ideal. This caused for hours lost on the data update and didn't allow our leaders to see the affects immediately like Workday Adaptive planing can do. I believe there was more familiarity with Kaufman Hall because of it being Excel based, from what I understand. I did not build anything in KH, so I don't have too much of an opinion on it. I love Adaptive and wouldn't want to use a separate budgeting system. We have implemented most of WD functional areas, so it only makes sense that we utilize Adaptive because of the ease of use between it and Workday.

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

I think that Adaptive Planning's "live" updating is a huge improvement from our prior software where we would have to do a full update overnight that took hours. With the real-time updating our leaders can budget much more quickly because they are able to see the impact from one sheet to another immediately. I think the dashboards and reporting capabilities are great also. Using Office Connect along with Adaptive Planning has been incredible. Having the ability to have a spreadsheet that can be updated with the click of a button is fantastic!

Workday Adaptive Planning Feature Ratings

8.8
Long-term financial planning
8
Financial budgeting
10
Forecasting
7
Scenario modeling
9
Management reporting
10
8.8
Financial data consolidation
9
Journal entries and reports
7
Multi-currency management
Not Rated
Intercompany Eliminations
8
Minority Ownership
Not Rated
Local and consolidated reporting
10
Detailed Audit Trails
10
9.5
Financial Statement Reporting
9
Management Reporting
10
Excel-based Reporting
10
Automated board and financial reporting
9
XBRL support for regulatory filing
Not Rated
9.0
Personalized dashboards
9
Color-coded scorecards
9
KPIs
Not Rated
Cost and profitability analysis
9
Key Performance Indicator setting
Not Rated
Benchmarking with external data
Not Rated
10.0
Flat file integration
10
Excel data integration
10
Direct links to 3rd-party data sources
Not Rated
BI Standard Reporting ()
Not Rated
Ad-hoc Reporting ()
Not Rated
Report Output and Scheduling ()
Not Rated
Data Discovery and Visualization ()
Not Rated
Access Control and Security ()
Not Rated
Mobile Capabilities ()
Not Rated

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