How Workday Adaptive Planning Helps Streamline Operations & Future-Proof Your Business

You deserve an agile financial planning solution that meets your needs now and can grow with you in the future. It is important to periodically evaluate changes within your organization, industry, and software to optimize your current architecture. With Workday Adaptive Planning, you get the technology you need for continuous financial planning, forecasting, reporting, and analysis so your organization can enhance operational efficiency, improve financial forecasting, adapt to change faster, and empower finance teams to drive future growth.

Why Operational Planning is Critical for CFOs & Finance Leaders

As your organization grows, your financial systems must evolve alongside it. A robust financial reporting and forecasting tool is not just beneficial; it’s a critical piece of the puzzle for maintaining the health and agility of your business.

Finance leaders, particularly CFOs, VPs of Finance, and Directors of Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A), face several common pain points related to reporting, forecasting, budgeting, and scenario planning. If you’re encountering these challenges, you should evaluate your current financial reporting and forecasting technology:

• Data Fragmentation: Multiple systems from different functions of the organization can lead to fragmented data sets. This often results in inconsistencies that undermine decision-making.
• Time-Consuming Processes: Traditional reporting methods require manual data entry and manipulation, which can be labor-intensive and prone to errors.
• Real-Time Reporting Demands: Organizational leadership may expect real-time data access and reporting. However, outdated systems and spreadsheets don’t support access to on-demand information.
• Accuracy and Compliance: Reports must be accurate and comply with regulatory standards. Errors in financial reporting can lead to compliance issues and may even damage credibility.
• Forecasting Challenges: Accurate forecasting is critical for strategic planning, yet many finance leaders struggle with it due to unpredictable market conditions and insufficient data integration.
• Resource Constraints: With limited staff and budget, finance teams may struggle to implement new technologies or processes that could streamline reporting. This can lead to burnout and decreased efficiency.

Inefficiencies in Manual Planning Processes

Many growing organizations are saddled with siloed systems, often due to legacy tools that aren’t keeping up. When systems don’t communicate, manual processes must bridge the gap — but this can dramatically slow down workflows. Within Workday Adaptive Planning, the finance team can leverage integrations with existing platforms to automate important processes and reduce the risk of human error. More importantly, they can let go of time-consuming, monotonous tasks and focus on analyzing and interpreting important information. Enlisting an experienced Workday Adaptive Planning Channel partner with deep industry knowledge can help your organization achieve and maintain an efficient and accurate process, so that you and your team can spend more time analyzing data and less time trying to organize it.

To save even more time, this financial planning software can also help your team standardize and automate reporting processes. By setting up push-button reports, you can transform what used to be a labor-intensive task into a streamlined operation. No more manual adjustments — generate a comprehensive, up-to-date report with just a click. With Workday Adaptive Planning, your team gets the exact information they need for data-driven decision-making in an effective and visually appealing format. This will allow the end users of the tool to be more proactive instead of reactive in a constantly evolving economic climate.

Workday Adaptive Planning: Key Features to Improve Operational Efficiency

Workday Adaptive Planning can be configured and maintained entirely by finance and accounting professionals, giving you the flexibility and independence needed to truly leverage the information within the software, without relying on developers or outside vendors to explain what’s going on behind the scenes. By addressing common FP&A challenges with Workday Adaptive Planning, finance leaders can enhance reporting capabilities, improve accuracy, and drive better business outcomes.

One of the most important things any financial planning software should help you achieve is consolidating data from various operational systems into one centralized location. Workday Adaptive Planning eliminates data silos and fragmentation, helping you gain access to reporting that is both accurate and efficient to become that single source of trust. If you have last-minute changes, it's no problem. With Workday Adaptive Planning, you can integrate new data seamlessly, refresh your reports, and leverage current and accurate information.

With all your data centralized and updated in real time, you can confidently approach your financial planning, knowing you have the insights needed to drive your organization forward.

Future-Proof Your Growing Organization with Workday Adaptive Planning Download

Best Practices for Getting the Most Out of Workday Adaptive Planning

Successful Implementation and Adoption

The initial setup of your Workday Adaptive Planning solution lays a foundation for future success. Spending time in this phase is essential to evaluate your organizational goals, processes, and key objectives. Implementing new software is not just about finding short-term success; it’s about balancing current needs and preparing to scale as those needs evolve.

Functionality to Help You Scale for Growth

This best-in-class cloud solution scales easily from emerging markets to Fortune 100 companies. The ease of use and flexible configuration can benefit any organization, regardless of size.

A key benefit of moving from decentralized data to a single source of truth is the ability to align plans to actuals at a more detailed level. This allows you to consider every facet and become a more proactive FP&A team.

If your organization expands via mergers or acquisitions, you can leverage Workday Adaptive Planning capabilities to blend a new entity’s information into the existing modeling. Suppose these incoming entities use other versions of Workday Adaptive Planning. In that case, you’ll be able to leverage the best of each solution so your architecture can continue evolving as your organization grows. The tool can even allow you to integrate information from multiple Workday Adaptive Planning solutions into one single instance for consolidated reporting.

Customization for Your Industry-Specific Needs

Even organizations within the same industry evaluate information and operate differently. Workday Adaptive Planning is completely configurable based on your industry needs and your organization’s practice.

The three core components of this customization are levels, dimensions, and a chart of accounts, and each facet is initially a blank slate. To help fully define your needs, consider the following:

• What are your foundational and reporting needs?
• How are you planning today?
• What do you like about your current planning process?
• What could make your planning and reporting processes easier?

Selecting a Workday Adaptive Planning Channel Partner

Our experienced advisors offer several insights to help you navigate the next steps and elevate your financial planning software capabilities. Choosing the right Workday Channel Partner is crucial for success, which is why an experienced partner like EisnerAmper can significantly improve how smoothly and effectively your organization transitions to this powerful planning tool.

The Future of Financial Planning & The Role of Advanced Technology

Embracing technological innovations is vital to keep up in a competitive market. By heavily investing in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and exploring its capabilities, Workday Adaptive Planning leverages innovative, predictive forecasting and anomaly detection tools.

Predictive forecasting allows you to create your own plan by entering parameters that create a predictive algorithm. This helps you envision where things are going based on historical trends and outliers. You can compare plans to see how they align with current trends and organizational goals, keeping you on track with future market predictions.

Anomaly detection analyzes trends, allowing Workday Adaptive Planning to notify you if something is out of the ordinary. This could include an irregular charge or value, which can help mitigate the possibility of fraud or human error.

Next Steps & Resources

Workday Adaptive Planning gives you the technology you need for continuous financial planning, forecasting, reporting, and analysis. With EisnerAmper, you get an experienced team that can help you get the most out of your financial planning software. Our professionals have more than 25 years' experience helping organizations take the next steps to plan smarter, report faster, and analyze better as they grow.

Advanced Technology Readiness

Together, let's unlock the full potential of Workday Adaptive Planning and empower your organization to navigate all the challenges and opportunities on the horizon. Contact us today to discuss how we can support you.