Workday Adaptive Planning

3 Reviews 5/5

An enterprise performance management software for long-term financial budgeting and forecasting.

Product Overview

Workday Adaptive Planning is an enterprise performance management software for long-term budgeting and forecasting. It enables financial data consolidation, journal entries and reports, multi-currency management, and detailed audit trails. Workday also provides personalized dashboards, color-coded scorecards, a variety of KPIs, and cost and profitability analysis.

Pros

  • Customizable dashboards
  • Easily drill down into transactions and customer data
  • In-memory data model for faster and more scalable processing
  • Supports multiple forecasting models
  • User-friendly and advanced reporting

Cons

  • Hard to modify existing reports without creating new ones
  • Not intended for small business
  • Setup is difficult

Target Market

Medium to large-sized companies across various industries that require detailed and flexible financial planning and analysis tools.

About Workday Adaptive Planning

Workday Adaptive Planning offers business planning through corporate performance management (CPM), sales planning, and workforce planning. It is a tool that allows for collaboration and gaining insights to make informed decisions rapidly. The software is designed to be powerful enough for organizations of any size, yet accessible for all who are involved in planning.

Workday Adaptive Planning provides a comprehensive set of cloud-based software solutions. These are supported by a robust, in-memory technology platform that enables functional and company-wide business planning and integrated analytics at a large scale. The solutions are designed for those closest to the business to plan effectively.


Workday Adaptive Insights Benefits:

  • Reduction of planning, reporting, and close cycles by over 70%
  • Manager engagement with an easy-to-use experience (web, Excel, mobile)
  • Reduction of costs by over 90% compared to traditional on-premise systems
  • Accessibility from anywhere to an always up-to-date application
  • Utilization of reporting and visuals to delve into KPIs and trends

Standard and Reporting Features

  • Customizable dashboards
  • Drill-in functionality within visuals
  • Report sharing and collaboration
  • Excel, PowerPoint and Word integration for 1-click report updates

Data Discovery and Visualization Features

  • Multiple pre-built visualization formats (heat maps, scatter plots, etc.)
  • Predictive analytics
  • In-sheet visualizations combine real-time models with charts
  • Sparklines visualize trends and allow adjustments visually

Platform Features

  • External Data Snapshots
  • In-memory data model for faster and more scalable processing
  • Multi-Data Source Reporting (Blending)
  • Data warehouse/dictionary layer
  • Role-based administration with permissions down to the cell level
  • Integration with Salesforce, NetSuite, Intacct, and MS Dynamics
  • End users can operate efficiently without IT assistance

Workday Adaptive Insights for Finance

EPM Software: Example of a profit and loss statement template in Adaptive Planning.
The above shows an example of a profit and loss statement template in Workday Adaptive Planning.

The corporate performance management or CPM software features of Workday Adaptive Planning for Finance provide active planning. This solution is also known as enterprise performance management or EPM software.

Modeling

The forefront of Workday Adaptive Planning Business Planning Cloud is its forecasting capabilities. The software enables the creation of models for various business aspects.

Financial modeling can align with fiscal year schedules, funding schedules, revenue recognition schedules, etc. Forecasts like programs, departments, or business units can be detailed at sub-levels.

Models Supported:

  • Budgeting expenses
  • Forecasting revenue
  • Workforce planning
  • Capital Planning
  • SaaS account modeling
  • Sales planning
  • Academic calendar modeling

Collaboration

Financial and operational modules can be shared beyond the finance team. The software facilitates a collaborative planning process, aiming to distribute reports and dashboards outside the finance department.

Features include:

  • Native workflow to sequence, assign, and track tasks for business owners
  • Process Tracker provides real-time visibility into planning processes and individual tasks.
  • Step-by-step guides for users dependent on their roles
  • Note sharing
  • Compare plan vs actuals
  • Visual Model Overview for single view business model and data flows

Analytics

Adaptive Insights Finance Dashboard Budgeting Software
Workday Adaptive Planning can create financial dashboards with various visualizations and charts to help monitor business performance.

Interactive dashboards, data visualizations, and charts are central to business performance evaluation. Workday Adaptive Planning offers these tools for personalizing and analyzing financial performance.

Features include:

  • Variance identification
  • Real-time data
  • KPIs
  • Sharing capabilities

Management Reporting

Management teams can receive the desired ad-hoc reporting for financial and sales teams. The software’s module for Management and Ad-Hoc Financial Reporting allows the distribution of reports with detailed drill-down capabilities when needed.

Features include:

  • Self-service reports
  • Personalized ad-hoc reports
  • Drag-and-drop web reporting
  • Built-in financial and sales intelligence
  • Output to multiple formats such as HTML, PDF, and Excel
  • Drilldown capabilities

Board Reporting

Workday Adaptive Planning Office Connect reporting example
Reporting features and capabilities from Workday Adaptive Planning can be integrated into Microsoft Office. This gives an Excel-proficient staff a way to continue using a program similar to their skill set.

Microsoft Office Suite and Office Connect integration enable the creation of reports, board books, and presentations using familiar Microsoft Office products like Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and more. The integration offers seamless transition and complete formatting control.

Integration

Workday Adaptive Planning provides integration capabilities with various ERP, HCM, CRM, and other data sources.

The software aims to automate data flow and reduce manual data extraction, maintaining data on a single platform with minimal IT involvement and no code-writing required.

Workday Adaptive Planning integrations with cloud and on-premise applications
Workday Adaptive Planning also provides integrations with numerous cloud applications and on-premise solutions.

NetSuite Reporting

NetSuite is used by companies as a primary ERP for accounting and overall business management. Workday Adaptive Planning prides itself on providing the reporting capabilities NetSuite may fall short of.

Conduct accounting transactions in NetSuite and let Workday Adaptive Planning use the historical data to manage future growth and improve company performance.

Sage Intacct Planning

Sage Intacct and Workday Adaptive Planning combine to automate accounting and planning functions into one complete system.

Sage Intacct manages company accounts such as transactions and actual balances. Workday Adaptive Planning can utilize this data to create budgets for those accounts by importing and exporting needed data.

Consolidation

Workday Adaptive Planning offers features for intercompany eliminations and financial consolidations, providing faster report generation.

Features include:

  • Automated currency translations
  • Reclassifications

Workday Adaptive Planning for Sales

Workday Adaptive Planning for Sales Capacity and Quota Plan
Workday Adaptive Planning for Sales can create capacity and quota plans for better sales revenue planning and predictability.

Workday Adaptive Planning for Sales offers quota, capacity, and territory planning for companies focused on increasing sales performance or improving sales department intelligence.

Features

  • Real-time scenario planning and forecasting
  • Set sales targets
  • Bottom-up sales staffing plans
  • Sales quotas
  • Territory assignment

Workday Adaptive Planning for Workforce Planning

Adaptive Insights human resource dashboard
Adaptive Insights can help with workforce planning and build comprehensive workforce and headcount dashboards.

Strategic workforce planning is now a part of Workday Adaptive Planning Business Planning Cloud.

Benefits

  • Integrate real-time data from HCM and ERP systems
  • Plan and optimize current and future workforce
  • Create business drivers
  • Maintain a single standard workforce model
  • Share plans with business leaders
  • Allow bottom-up input via Excel
  • Track common planning tasks
  • Monitor changes and issues with an audit trail
  • Track plans against actuals

Workday Adaptive Planning Pricing

The cost of Workday Adaptive Planning will depend on several factors, such as:

  • Package desired
  • Number of licenses
  • Integrations needed
  • Length of contract

User-based pricing is designed to enable company-wide planning and participation.

Video Overview

Price Range Learn More
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Product Overview

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User Reviews of Workday Adaptive Planning

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on April 18th, 2022 by Kevin Murphy

Workday Adaptive Planning has given a lot of time back to my life. The initial plan took over six months and went through the holiday season. Now I’m actually able to enjoy the holiday season with my family and am spending more time doing things that mean something to the company when at work, rather than just reporting and issuing outdated financial statements.

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on September 13th, 2019 by Mitch Grossman

It’s important to have a tool like Adaptive Insights so we can pivot and be as agile as we need to be.

We’ve got vineyard managers who are looking at the vines and buds and change assumptions. We have that big picture idea for what our harvest will be like. We use it from a supply and demand standpoint to look at our sales and marketing and find out how much we are going to be able to sell.

Finding out what we’re going to sell in 2-3 years is just as important as figuring out what we’re going to plan today.

We can adjust the plans as needed and see where the dollars are being spent and how they are being spent. Adaptive Insights pulls all the pieces and shows us what road we’re going down.

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on September 13th, 2019 by Brianne Martell

Prior to Adaptive, we were using Excel. So imagine sending 400 Excel files out to each individual restaurant and consolidating them. I still have nightmares.

You find it’s incredibly different to stay on top of a single source of truth. I never realized how much time I spent gathering information. The speed is so quick with Adaptive.

I can put together a budget and the field has more ownership of the process of what they are doing. They can drill down and understand what is driving costs inside of their doors.

In 4 moves, I get my budgeted goals, my year to year numbers, I have it in dollars and my percentages in one location.