Workday Adaptive Planning

Pros

It does everything and FP&A team could ever wish for.

Cons

It takes quite some time and training to learn how to use.

Pros

Workday allowed us to do all of our financial planning in one central hub. We can easily budget, generate financial statements, and run many different what if versions for all revenue and budget scenarios. Super user friendly for all planning options!

Cons

It was slightly tough to implement and get things started in the system, just very different than other financial planning tools I’ve worked with. Once you get it implemented, everything is smooth sailing!

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Workday Adaptive Planning

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Workday Adaptive Planning

Pros

Use it for accounting purposes both domestic and imports in our retail company. It is more intuitive and flexible to configure compared to our previous software PeopleSoft.

Cons

It's proprietary so integrating into our internal tools is challenging.

Pros

I mainly used workday when I was working for FedEx. It was useful when organizing bank statements and schedules. Keeping up with benefits and Tax information was a plus as well.

Cons

The only thing I had an issue with was after the update of the workday; there was not a clear enough explanation of how to navigate the apps. The new dashboard shows you everything on the main screen. You still needed to somewhat navigate through the site yourself and figure things out on your own.

Pros

great for budgeting and tracking expenses during month or quarter for large companies, easy to use interface, nice clean layout

Cons

way to expensive unless you own cooperate businesses or companies, not suitable for small business owners

Pros

It looks nice, and it theoretically should have capability to use data year over year. That would be nice, for the future.

Cons

It's hard to use, understand, navigate, and figure out what is going on. For an onsite team member doing data entry, it's just way harder than it should be in my opinion.

Pros

For what I used it is very good for forecasting and integrating things such as SAP.

Cons

I required extensive training to achieve this, can be complex

Pros

Everything you need is right there. Great all in one software. View time off taken, time off requests, paystubs, taxes, ect. Everything is at your fingertips.

Cons

Everything is at your fingertips if you can figure out where it is. The user interface is a little confusing at first and navigating the site isnt the easiest.

Pros

It's a great product for reporting purposes within the industry. The office connect add on for excel is really helpful and makes it very easy to switch between different dimensions of data and dissecting.

Cons

Tool works well but there are gaps in terms of functionality around cost allocations and the way it uses master data elements.

Pros

I really appreciate the scalability & connectivity features the software offers. I also love that it integrates AI to help us stay on top of budget trends.

Cons

I have yet to find a drawback with the software.

Pros

We use Adaptiv for our budgeting purposes. Their importing function makes it easy for users to upload data for analysis. Adaptiv planning has made our budgeting planning easy!

Cons

There were a few bugs in the past, but they have been resolved.

Pros

As a widely adopted solution in the realm of corporate planning, it offers a range of features aimed at improving financial planning and decision-making

Cons

Sometimes it can be complicated but usually ok

Pros

it runs without interfering with other programs.

Cons

does not have any issues that I am aware of.

Pros

Allows so many different ways to breakdown data.
Great customer support. The respond quickly and are very knowledgeable.
Easy to manage users with different access levels.
Adaptive is always working to enhance or update features. The platform develops continuously, which is great for the large user base.
Hosts free webinars every so often.
Can be accessed from anywhere as long as you have internet access.

Cons

The learning curve is steep, it takes a lot of time to really get comfortable with the platform.
Not a lot of video tutorials.
The terminology can be confusing sometimes.
Adaptive is open to technical/programming suggestions but often take time to be enacted. You sometimes have to wait for the next release to get the issue resolved.

Pros

The product if very adaptable. We recently went through a sell process where we were sold by a public company to a private equity firm and back to a public company within a two and half year period. Adaptive was very key to providing the analysis and financial information required for the sell process. While with the private equity firm we changed to a fiscal year but they required us to report both fiscal and calendar year numbers. We also had to push the various EBITDA adjustments back into the financial statements for comparative purposes. I also like the customer service and the fact that Adaptive pushes out a couple of major releases each year to add new functionality requested by the user community.

Pros

The ability to build a bottoms up budget/forecast is an attractive component on this software. It is an assumption based model that is easy to follow and update in the backend

Cons

There is some functionality that it lacks for assumption sheet creation.

Pros

I like that adaptive has continued to innovate and improve their product over time. The basic plan option is solid for a SMB, though there are some individual bells and whistles that I would like it to have like Office Connect that require a more expensive membership

Cons

Learning to speak the adaptive "language" is a big barrier to entry from an employee perspective, we become afraid to change the model for fear of breaking it so we aren't leveraging all we have available to us.

Pros

- The software is a cloud based, so you will have access anywhere you have the internet.
- No more “this worksheet is locked by another user” message.
- Imports and Exports to/from excel seamlessly…for those of you that like to work out of excel.
- Dashboard capabilities for more real time department metrics and visibility to spend.
- Rolling forecasting capabilities that allow us as a company to focus more on the future and less on the past.
- Instant Company budget/forecast results.
- Audit trails…never have to worry who, what, or when someone changed a number you budgeted or forecasted. All changes will be tracked.
- Company-wide visibility to Personnel and Capex planning that drives the cost of benefits, IT equipment, and supplies.

Cons

- Software enhancements are only every 4 to 5 months.
- Levels (Organization Departments) can be restricting to planning across multiple departments
- Noting variances in a report can be tricky at times.

Pros

The software is flexible. It can be developed and managed internally or you can work with external experts if needed. I like that the cloud software is continuously improving and developing to meet the needs of its customers. There are new releases every six months that improve its functionality based on customer needs and requests. And more importantly, all updates are done on the cloud so that there is no need for the IT department to get involved.

Cons

There aren't many things specific to the software that I don't like. I would say that the most difficult part about using this software is managing the requests from management so that it doesn't compromise the value of the software.

Pros

[1] Version comparison is easy for variance analysis
[2] Adaptive office connect is a very useful excel based reporting tool
[3] Flexible system based planning and scenario analysis accelerates planning cycles and reduces data integrity issues

Cons

The biggest issue that i have run into is the way actuals flow into locked plan versions.
If you have a formula in a locled plan version that references actuals and you change the actuals data, then it will change you plan numbers even though the period is locked.

Pros

One source for all models and reported numbers. Interconnected data makes it easy to see the full effect of any changes, large or small.

Cons

Customer support needs to work on responsiveness.

Pros

The System is easy to use, developer friendly and customizable

Cons

Reporting functionality within the system could be enhanced. We currently use templates created in excel to house formating or additional formulas that are not available in Adaptive but are requried for our reporting.

Pros

It is super flexible, allowing the user to enter costs by category, department/dimension/cost centre and easily switch between views. You can write little formula to budget by run rate, uplift by a percentage or similar to prior year phasing. You just need to learn a few rules.

Cons

It does not interface well with Workday itself, there was no way I could import staff basic salary into AP from Workday by department and employee for instance.

Pros

- Quick and easy to consolidate all accounts for all business units
- Status tracking is made easy
- Superb customer services

Cons

Would love to see the changes in future releases:
- Ability to import formulas rather than having to manually set up 1000+ formulas in Adaptive;
- Ability to line up notes in reports

Pros

Ease of implementation and use.

Cons

Still developing some modules, need time to improve