Name: Elevating FP&A Performance with Workday Planning: Building a Collaborative Planning Process, Flexible Reporting, and Embedded AI in Action
Uploaded: 2025-10-15T18:16:08.315Z
Duration: 1 h 24 s
Description: Elevating FP&A Performance with Workday Planning: Building a Collaborative Planning Process, Flexible Reporting, and Embedded AI in Action

Transcript for "Elevating FP&A Performance with Workday Planning: Building a Collaborative Planning Process, Flexible Reporting, and Embedded AI in Action": Alright. Hey, everyone. Welcome to our demonstration of Workday financial planning. Give folks a few minutes to trickle on in here before we get started. Alright. We're gonna go ahead and get started here in the interest of time. Welcome everyone to our Workday Live for financial planning. Alright. Here is our safe harbor statement. In essence, it says all the, material we demo today is currently available. And if there's anything that's not, we will call that out. So make any purchasing and buying decisions, at your discretion. Okay? I'm Joaquin So to. I'm one of our solution consultants here at Workday, focused on work to adaptive planning, so all things financial planning and workforce planning. Been at Workday a number of years now. Prior to this, I also worked here in house on our financial planning team. So I use Workday as a practitioner, everything from forecasting, budgeting, all the ins and outs of adaptive. And with me is Becky. She'll be on chat support. If you wanna introduce yourself, Becky. Hello, everyone. Good to meet you. My name is Becky, and I'm also a solution consultant supporting our planning product here at Workday. Yes. I'm just gonna be here behind the scenes answering any questions that you have, so feel free to put them in chat. Cool. Thanks, Becky. Alright. So here's the agenda for today's, demo in the next sixty minutes. First, we'll kick it off with a few slides, kind of setting the stage for our current planning environment, so what we see from customers and prospects. Then we'll get into Workday, adaptive planning, do an introduction, level set, and we'll get into the demo, the main chunk of the events, showcase our features, functionalities, show show you all flavors of adaptive here, and then we'll wrap it up with next steps, and follow-up information. Okay? Alright. So as we think about the world of business today, you know, there's a lot of ever changing experiences, evolving landscapes, and, you know, navigating the new work world includes new ways of working, navigating economic uncertainties, and worldly matters that disrupt industry, industries across the board. And so, therefore, everybody needs to think differently, especially our FP and A functions when we think of impactful changes, you know, including company market or even competitive environments. And so organizations need to pursue a more agile and adaptable process to be able to pivot effectively. And the issue really is a lot of our FNA teams that we see and work with use legacy systems, which have have them really disconnected and using manual processes. And so this hinders them from being able to collaborate, grow, and spend time on more strategic initiatives. And so a lot of our customers are, you know, asking, you know, hey. What's the solution? Is there a solution? And there must be a better way. And so this is where we introduced Workday adaptive planning, which Workday adaptive planning is an enterprise wide planning solution that provides the intuitive user experience, flexible and stable modeling, and real time data insights. Basically, all parts of the organization can plan under one sole under one roof, not just finance. So for example, sales is planning the number of deals they will close or the number of stores that will open while market being, on the other hand, maybe planning their promotional calendar while, you know, folks in finance are planning their following year's budget. And so in our demo today, we're going to focus on financial planning, but know that Workday, adaptive planning can handle the needs of your entire organization. Here are some of our, largest customers. Don't just take our word for it. A lot of our customers you see here across a number of different industries have realized the value of Workday Adaptive Planning. Some of them leverage workforce planning, financial planning, and a number of different, offerings we have here with adaptive. Again, another slide here just kinda breaking out the industries. We cover all industry verticals. Again, the tool is very agile, adaptable to the needs of so many different business types, large and small businesses. And so that's what makes Workday Adaptive Plan, although across many industries, more emerging customers, large enterprise customers. Alright. You might recognize a few names on here. Perhaps worked at a prior organization that's here on the board. So alright. So with Workday Planning, I wanna call out three of our biggest differentiators. First is our ease of use. So you'll find that Workday Planning can be fully owned by finance without the intervention of a third party team or your IT team to maintain your reports, dashboards, or even models. Right? It's all self-service by FP and A. Second, we have our Elastic HyperCube. So this is simply our in memory engine that's gonna deliver the performance you need to scale and grow as an organization. Gone are the days of recreating a new dimension or attribute on every single sheet or every dashboard when you add new elements. And finally, we have extendibility. And this means that Workday adaptive planning is able to seamlessly expand across the rest of Workday's ecosystem, whether we're thinking of Workday HR or Workday financials. There is complete seamless transparency across the board, and everything is in one place at your fingertips all the time. Alright. So last slide here before we go into the demo. We've got three demo personas which we'll be going in and out of today. First, we have Teresa Serrano, who is our VP of FDNA, and she'll set corporate targets using global drivers. She has completed visibility and access into adaptive. Second, we've got Angela. Angela is one of our department leads. She will build and submit a bottom set plan to help meet the targets set by Theresa. And then finally, we've got Patrick. He's our director of FP and A. He also has, complete, you know, adaptive access. He's gonna review and approve, changes to budget, update presentations in our OfficeConnect function that we'll demo and, make sure all our numbers fall within our budget guidelines. Alright? Okay. So with that, we'll get into our demo here. Switch gears. Alright. Great. So right now, we are in Workday adaptive planning here. As I mentioned earlier, we're logged in as our first user persona. So we're in as Teresa Serrano, again, that VP of FP and A. A. Level set the stage here for those folks who may not have adaptive experience or have never used a similar tool. What we have here is a dashboard, and this is simply our landing page. Now keep in mind, you can set this landing page to be whatever you'd like. It can be a dashboard. It can be reports. It could be a table. It it's very configurable. So whenever you sign in, you land on here. Before I start up, I wanna talk about, permission and, security settings. So right now, I'm in as my superuser, but, traditionally, you wouldn't come in with the appropriate security, access that you would have. So, for example, our power user has access to the entire company, structure here. So all the different cost centers or, you know, departments or supervisory orgs. But maybe I'm just a leader of our North America or US, division. When I come into Adaptive, I would only have access to The United States, you know, cost centers or departments. Right? So it's very specific to whatever level of access each user has. So keep that in mind as you evaluate the solution here. Okay. Across the top, we've got some foundational, toggles. First is our time toggle. This simply indicates, you know, our time, which we're looking at this dashboard through. So the level of granularity, is it, you know, a monthly view? Is it quarterly view? Perhaps it's a annual view. You can be as as specific as you need or go as granular as you'd like. Next to that, we've got a level structure. This can be anything from your cost center hierarchy, to departments, to level structure, or supervisory orgs, etcetera, etcetera. Be able to go in and plan it as granular as you'd like to the lowest leaf level, or we can also plan at a total or higher company level. Right? Depends how granular we'd like to go out and plan or slice and dice our views by. We've got currency measures here. We can set up any currencies that we'd like. We're working in USD today. Up in the top right, we've got our versioning drop down. So versioning is think of this as your as your iterations of a budget or a plan. As we go through our budgeting cycle, we have our pass one, pass two, perhaps, or pass three and pencils down past that plan. So these are all the different versions I have here in adaptive, anything from prior year's budget to live working copies to my forecast, scenarios. Right? So scenarios are similar to versions, but scenarios are think of these as a sandbox version. So these are only for your set of eyes. These won't be shared with the rest of the users unless you wanna publish the scenario and and make it shareable to everyone else. We can have shared scenarios as well. But the idea here is that we can have a limited iterations and help our team, you know, have different passes and see parallel forecast and understand if I make a trade off here, what's the dollar cost impact? And one of our value adds here is that work the adaptive planning. We won't charge customers for additional usage. You can have unlimited scenarios and versions. One of our customers, ExxonMobil, they have tens of thousands of iterations as they map out crude oil production going into the future. And so they heavily leverage these versions, these versions here to help them budget and forecast accurately. Okay? Up in the top left, we've got our main menu. So this is our main navigation point, adaptive. This is where you would come in, find your way through adaptive, whether you need to go to different, you know, sheets, models, etcetera, etcetera. So quick run through here. Our sheets, Thinkabuses has all of our data entry points for planning and forecasting. So maybe if you're in Excel, Thinkabuses all your different tabs across the bottom. Add Add anything from my financial statements to my expenses, my traveling, my capital expenses, so on and so forth. So this is where all of data entry is made. Okay? I've got my assumptions here. Think of these other top level drivers, anything from workforce, the product drivers, you see into our planning budgets from a top stand perspective. It can help streamline that, budget creation process. Reporting here, these are our reports. These are web based reports. We also have OfficeConnect reports, which we'll get into later. But these are all web based reports which we can own as FP and A users, you know, having ease and flexibility to update these reports. Again, these don't have to be owned by anyone but yourselves. This can be easily maintained and edited. Dashboards here is what I have behind me. Any visualizations. Let's see here. Processes. Right? Processes are where I can come in, manage and target tasks among end users. So I can come in as a department lead or as a director, you know, establish who's gonna create or on what part of the forecast cycle, go in and delegate those tasks, set timelines, set pencils down, dates so my team is all on board with the same, criteria here. Formulas, modeling, we won't get into all of this today for the sake of time, but this is where I could come in, create new formulas, you know, build new different scenarios, dimensions, levels, attributes into my model. As I mentioned earlier with the Elastic HybridCube, when I build these new dimensions or levels or attributes, it's a onetime exercise, and these get applied across all my different models or sheets or dashboards. I don't have to recreate these every time I build a new dashboard. Add in here is where I would come in, apply security settings for new users, dish out, new security for people in the system. Integration here, I can come in and bring data from any any system. Right? Any outside source, whether that's, you know, Tableau, Snowflake, Datalix, etcetera. We can connect to any third party source system through our API connectors. Okay? This is a quick run through of our main menu navigation point. Again, we'll touch some of these today, but not all of them, but just so you can have a understanding of how to navigate your way through adaptive here. Excuse me. Okay. So we're on dashboards. First things first, let's take a look at one of these dashboards, how we can understand how dashboards work. Every dashboard you see here is built on data that's in the system. These are simply visualizations as I start to performance of my company or my organization. But let's say I wanna interpret this dashboard. Right? Understand my product revenue. Instead of slicing and dicing all this in Excel, maybe dumping all my data into a pivot table, I can do this through a dashboarding. So all these dashboards are drillable, so I can drill in through any of my dimensions I have here. And, again, these are all my dimensions I've built out in adaptive as I add new dimensions. All these dimensions will show up for all my dashboards here. Right? I don't have to recreate dimensions. They're simply available for me to leverage here. So let's go back into our product revenue tile and explore our revenue by our location groups and maybe peel back one of those layers and understand, you know, all this revenue I have here, where is it really coming from? What location drive most of my revenue? As I peel back one more layer on our Great Britain location, maybe I wanna peel this in by customer now and understand, you know, which customers, comprise most of my revenue in in Great Britain. Right? And maybe I wanna go one level deeper and understand, okay, customer five, what products are in customer five's portfolio? So let's drill in by our product dimension. Now I can see all of the products across customer five's portfolio, what they have, maybe any areas for opportunity or any white space where you can tap in and, you know, sell more and create more revenue for our organization. So a a quick example here of how we can peel back the layers through a dashboard, through our dimensionality, understand, you know, how is this main number being comprised, and help you give those answers back to your business partners in a in a timely fashion without having to go and do offline exercises. This can all be collaborative. Even your business partners can leverage adaptive, if they have, obviously, adaptive access and kind of work in the same in the same world here. Okay? Now you're probably wondering, how can I build one of these dashboards? You mentioned they're self-service. They're owned by FP and A. And the answer, it's very easy. Right? Think of these as all drag and drop functionality. So let's go ahead and build a dashboard just to showcase how easy and simplistic this can be for your organization. So we'll come into our dashboards menu, and over in the top right, we'll go and then add a new, perspective. And we could just call this our ad hoc one dashboard and save that. Okay. We'll be prompted to select the level here. We'll just go to the total company level for now. And now I can simply start to play around in my blank canvas here, and I'll go ahead and edit this, dashboard. So you'll see I have a number of preconfigured, out of the box dashboard options I can use, anything from column, the line, the bar charts, etcetera, etcetera. I'll go with one of my favorites, waterfall chart. I use these a lot in my prior role working in FP and A here at Workday. I use this as a way to track all the ins and outs of my organizations that I supported, you know, what were their what was their starting cost of workforce, for example, versus their ending cost of workforce throughout the month. Now we can drill into our accounts menu here. Through our accounts, bring in any account you can need, whether it's top line, revenue, income, expenses, CapEx. Any account that's in adaptive, you can leverage for building dashboards. Alright. So maybe you wanna explore those expenses I have tied to my to my business. I can simply drag and drop these onto the canvas. And as you'll see, I'll have a populated, visual here. Right? And so maybe I wanna look at, you know, a prior period. I can do that as well. Maybe I can go back in time. Maybe look at, you know, let's say, March '24. I can go ahead and do that. And, again, you can see all the ins and outs through this waterfall chart. It's pulling all my actual I have in adaptive. And best of all, as you saw here as you'll see here, once I click done, I can drill into these dashboards. As you saw before with my prior dashboard tiles, I can drill in by any dimensions I have set up here. So maybe I wanna explain to my business partners, hey. This 6.3 of OPEX, you know, what were all the, variances? Right? I can see a big variance here in my travel and entertainment category, but I wanna, you know, get that transactional level of detail, understand what really transpired so I can communicate this back to my business partners for, you know, going forward, having those strategic conversations. So let's go ahead here and drill into our 6.3 of OPEX, and we'll drill by our accounts to see what accounts are making up the largest of variances here. So as I can kinda see here through my 2.6, it's travel and entertainment. And, again, we'll take this one step deeper, look at all my accounts here, and I see it's other TME. Right? So maybe other TME can be anything from nontraditional travel, maybe team lunches, those sorts of things. And now let's go and buy a location. Right? Understand what location as a if we're a worldwide company, drove most of these variances. Okay. We're looking at USA. Let's do this one more time, and let's drill in by our, data. I wanna see those transactions actually transpired. So once I reload here alright. Guess you're getting a little bit of a, hiccup. Let's try this one more time. Nope. Alright. Alright. So in the interest of time, we'll save that for a different day, but we were gonna drill into our transactional report where I could drill and see the the variance that put us over plan here. So being able to drill in and seamlessly explore transactional details in real time without, again, having to dump all of our data into an Excel file offline and, you know, slice and dice those elsewhere. Okay? So let's go back to our home page here. Alright. Apologies there. Let me refresh this one more time. Nope. Alright. Apologies there, folks. I'm dealing with a bit of a system issue, it appears, at the moment. Alright. One sec, everyone. Okay. Let's go into our next portion here. Let's go to process tracker. K? So right now, we're seeing what process tracker is in front of us. I've switched personas now into Patrick O'Brien. He's our director of FP and A. And so process tracker seems to be where I could come in, as I saw earlier, into my processes and look at all the different tasks I've assigned out to my business partners, or to my end users. Right? So with process tracker, I can come in. I can adjust the workforce plan. I can update, process target dates. So up in the top right, I'm able to come in and manage the process. Oops. Alright, folks. I believe there's an issue with our tenants. Give me one sec here. Alright. Alright, folks. Looks like I'm having a bit of issues here with my, tenants. Go ahead and try out the last persona. And then it's Angela. So she's my department lead. Again, she has the same process, task pane here. She can see the adjustments to workforce plan. She can review all item expenses. And once you assign these tasks through the process guide, she can come in out through process guide and start to kick these tasks off. Okay. Alright. So it looks like my tenants are down for the for the for the count. Let me try this one more time. Apologies there, folks. I'll see if, there's a worker. Otherwise, we may we may have to pause this this Workday live here. Okay. Alright, folks. I think we are back in business here. Sincerest apologies there. Had a bit of an authentication issue behind the scenes, but thank you for bearing with us. Okay. Back to the live working budget. Again, sincerest apologies there for this hiccup. Let me go back a few steps here. Back to where so we're again, we're back in as Teresa Serrano here. Let's go ahead and go into our shared, dashboard targets here. So what we wanna do is do do some target setting for the upcoming year. Okay. Again, we're gonna select the level from the top, go to the total company level. As I can see now is I've got my OPEX target set at $46,000,000 here. And so we will see the dashboards update dynamic in real time once we adjust our targets. If I come down here, I can see a number of different plan drivers that I can either adjust manually or use the intelligent plan. Now the intelligent plan is part of our embedded AI capabilities that use past, you know, actuals, past trends to help us bake a plan in, for us. Right? We don't have to go through and piece together a plan from the bottoms up. Now up here in this embedded dashboard, you'll see the light light blue line is a prior year. We can see right now our current target is rolling up higher. Right? That could be due to inflation, or a number of other goals. Now we've got the red line. The red line is an intelligent plan. Right? That's driven off the intelligent plan toggles if we select those. And, again, this is based off of data points and historicals, and this is where the the predictive model thinks your OPEX will land based off the data provided. So we've been tasked to make some adjustments to payroll and tax and benefits starting in April. Okay? So we got tax and benefits here, payroll, and we're gonna make adjustments here starting April '24. So you can set the intelligent plan as your baseline, but we're gonna turn off the toggles for, payroll and tax and benefits, which we have had turned off here, and we're gonna use, manual adjustments as we have these toggles turned on. So that indicates, you know, do I pick up on past historicals, or do I use the manual numbers I put here off to the right? So let's change payroll from 5%. Let's up this to 10%. And I can now copy this, percentage all the way to the end of time. And then for tax and benefits, let's up this number from 2% to 5%. And, again, I can copy this to the end of time. Alright? And if I scroll down, everything you see in blue are changes I've made that have not been saved yet. So that's how I know I've made changes that have not been saved. I wanna come up to this, icon third from the right and hit save, and this will save all my adjustments I've made to my plan drivers. Alright. As you can see up in the top, I have my optics. Target number has been updated based off these payroll percentages I've made, the April and and beyond as well as to my tax and benefits. Right? And now what I can do is I can drill into this OPEX target, maybe by our function. Again, go down that rabbit hole, go to sales and marketing, see my departments, you know, maybe look at that sales north territory and look at my accounts. Right. Now I can see all my different accounts that drive the majority of OPEX. In this case, it's the payroll. Obviously, most of our headcount sits here. And So that's what's driving the majority of our OPEX number that we see here. Right? So same exercise you saw before with dashboards. Again, we can peel back the layers and understand, you know, what's driving my targets, what's driving my revenue, what's driving my expenses, so on and so forth. Now from the admin perspective, again, still necessary to Serrano. I wanna come in now and push the new targets down to end users. So let's go back to our process tracker. And so in the process tracker, I can see what tasks have been completed. I can see I reviewed and adjusted those OPEX targets. And, again, I have quickly flashed this earlier, but the process guide enables me as a as a super user to come in and set, target dates. Maybe I wanna push out the, deadlines for my team. I can push these out to say maybe October. Right? Give my team ample time to to make changes. Right. I can see how much of my tasks have been completed, you know, what tasks are running late, so on and so forth. And, again, the beauty with this is there's no Excel templates or emails that you have to send out, to your entire team. This is all be looked at and managed within one central location. Right, you don't have to worry about sending notifications, but you still can send notifications here to alert your team that there's been new tasks assigned. You can also create a new task, right, if you have to maybe make a second adjustment to workforce plans. Or let's say we wanna review CapEx. Right? We can do different tasks here, assign it to specific users within the system, and pick and choose who's in their own work part of the forecast and budget process. Alright? Okay. So this is process guide. Let's switch over to our end user, Angela, which we quickly came in as earlier during our technical delay. Give me one sec. Okay. So now Angela has come in as department lead for Sales North. So Angela here, if you go into her profile, she's a manager for Sales North. And if you go back to the dashboard, she only has access to a specific cost center, right, or a specific department. She can't see the entire organization. So if I go to my dashboards here, the same dashboard I was on before for the total company dashboard, Angela can only leverage that sales north territory. So as we see here, I can only select that sales north because that's what Angela manages. She can't see total company or the rest of the regions because that's been grayed out due to her security access. Right? But if you go back to our process guide, let's come in now and start to make changes to our budget if we hop in and go through the tasks that we've been assigned. Okay. So the first task I have to work on here is I have to address my workforce plan. So let me select my appropriate level here, Sales North. And right now, I can see there's a gap. There's a gap between my my current target and my current, you know, my my current target and my current, target expense I've been assigned. So I need to add more headcount to my to my organization here, to meet to close the gap here. And so let's add a few new hires. So first, I can add an I can add a new row here. I can copy a row, for the sake of time here. Maybe we'll call this a TBH, so a placeholder for our budget. Now over here, if I scroll over to the right, I can select dates to, have this set individual start. So maybe we'll start this individual in July, and I can specify, you know, what kind of health benefits are they on, any pension plans, any merit adjustments, merit cycles, are they on commission plans, so on and so forth. I can even allocate headcount across different, organizations or departments. We can see here there's an individual who has allocated their time across the sales north and the sales south departments, and that's, easy to do through our allocation, exercise over here. Let's go ahead and save this change and see how this number updates dynamically at the top. So we'll try to close a gap now to get closer to our target expense. So we've see we've closed a gap here. Maybe we add another head, or we can maybe pull up our start dates if we go to perhaps May. So if we update to May now, I can maybe see my targets more in line with what I'm expecting. Okay. So we're closer to our target. So we'll keep this there for now. But, again, the idea here is that as we add work workforce heads, as we add new headcount to our plan, we can see how far or how close we are to our target numbers or envelopes that we receive from the top, and as we start to march towards those plan numbers. One other call here is with our workforce planning, exercise. We can also drill into details, understand, you know, all the living details behind our headcount. So this individual is set to start in June '24. So if I scroll over to June, I can start to see all the impacts, coming across the board in June. Anything from, you know, onetime recruiting fees to all my benefits and health expenses, you know, money commissions. Right? So I can see that monthly breakout as I start to reconcile headcount month over month, or maybe I wanna account for a spike in salary expense that hit in June that we weren't maybe anticipating. I can see that through this detailed, headcount breakout. Okay? Let's go ahead now and check off task one as complete, And now we'll go into task number two. We'll start to review those line item expenses. So, again, just a call out here. We're still in that sales north division. Again, it's the access that Angela has. It's the department that she manages, so nothing beyond that. And so here I see I have all my expense accounts, OPEX, you know, training, salary expenses, anything OPEX you can imagine. So let me expand this a bit here and bring in our actuals from last year. So we have a bit of a comparison point. As you'll as you'll notice, all my actuals are in green. If I scroll to the left, all my actual numbers from 2023 are in green, whereas black numbers are budget numbers going forward, numbers that haven't actualized yet. Alright. So we brought in our actuals. You'll also see a number of cells with little blue carrots on the right hand side. These simply mean that there's a formula living beneath these cells. So these are form formula driven cells, whereas we have other cells that don't have these blue carrots. These are hard coded or simply just numbers that we typed in. So you have the flexibility there with adaptive planning to have formula driven budgets. You can have manual overrides and, override those formulas. So let's take a look at a formula, understand how formulas actually work. So if I come down this telephone accounts line, and I wanna understand how this formula for telephone is being comprised. I I can see there's a formula up here. So it's simply taking my personal accounts. So the number of FTEs onboard, and it's multiplying it by a telephone assumption per head I have onboard. So let me drill in here for some more visibility. Okay. So here I have the number of heads on board. So in this case, I've got 6.6 heads, and that's due to a partial head being allocated across two departments. Okay? I'm multiplying that number of head by a telephone assumption of 40. So we're assuming each head will incur a telephone cost of $40 per month, and that's ultimately driving our our telephone expense. Right? So it's a very simple formula. And, again, there's no coding required. Right? These are all word based formulas where I can bring my accounts, and I can easily decipher these or interpret these formulas. I wasn't trying to understand how I'm building my forecast for my budget. What are the main drivers beneath these? Are there any assumptions or or, you know, top down drivers? In this case, it's the cost per head of $40. Okay? Now let's take a look at one of our accounts that isn't formula driven. So in this case, we've got our training account here. Maybe this is our training expenses for any maybe maybe your training to make sure our employees are up to speed with, you know, AI or any anything. Right? So open the over here on the right hand side, I've got my full year training, amount of 11,000. But, say, I wanna up this amount, let's call it 25,000. Right? I can manually input this amount, and when doing so, I'll be prompted to apply this amount a number of different ways. So I can spread this budget out, fortunately, throughout the year. I can peanut butter spread it. I can spread it out to reflect last year's seasonality. So when did we incur training expenses last year? I wanna reflect that same timing for this coming year, or I can weigh a number of different ways. I can front weigh it, back weigh it, or choose an assumption. But let's go ahead and use seasonality from last year to align our budget for this year. And so what you'll see now is I've spread out my budget for training to hit the same months of February, March, and May because those months those are the months where we had training last year, so February, March, and May. Right? So now I'm using that, intelligent plan I have here to to easily, you know, spread that seasonality out to mirror what we incurred last year if we expect to have training the same a few months this year. Okay? And, again, we'll save our changes, so nothing's left in blue. Something else I wanna point out is our anomaly detection. So as we go ahead and create a plan and we add changes or we make changes, maybe take out headcount, or add a headcount as we just said in the prior exercise, there's a anomaly detection feature up in the top, which I can use to call out, you know, what's beyond my outlier range. So are there any anomalies that shouldn't be in plan or I should consider before locking down this plan and being pencils down? So as you can see, all these blue or purple boxes are, you know, calling out anomalies in plan. So first, I can see that there's anomalies in my salary and wages on my payroll expenses because of the new headcount I added. Now keep in mind this headcount starts in June, and this individual was onboard last year in June. So this is why it's calling out these these spikes in salary and payroll. Right? And as as you can see, if I hover over one of these cells, I can see that there's a upper and lower bound at 40%. And so this simply means I've set guardrails for my anomaly detection, so it only calls out values that are beyond my upper and lower limits. Right? And I can choose those limits to be however much I'd like. Maybe it's 80% instead of 40 or maybe it's 10%, right, to be as conservative as I want to be in my budget or give myself extra wiggle room, right, before the budget is approved. Down here, also a number of tax and benefits tied to the headcount I have on board. Right down here, I see an an outlier for maintenance. This maintenance line or, excuse me, telephone line. Right? Telephone, usually about $300 a month. Now it's up to 18,000. So what I can do also is I can add in a note. Maybe I wanna add a add a add a note here. You can see this is a this is a one time, expense. Right? Hit okay. And now if I save my notes here, remove anomaly detection, I can see that there's a note. Now it's a red caret instead of a blue caret, and that simply enables me to come back and see all the notes I've made so I know it's just truly not an outlier, and I'm able to keep this, total of an expense amount in in plan. Right? Alright. One more thing I wanna call out here and highlight is our our audit trail functionality. So what that simply means is we're able to trace back changes we make. So we've inputted 18,000 a while back. We also made a comment that, hey. This is within our our budget. We you're gonna have a long time spike. Maybe we're switching telephone providers. We're getting new telephones in the office. I wanna trace those changes I've made. So through audit trail, I can see who's made changes. They're all time stamped. Right? So I can see when I first made a change back in March. I checked with Patrick a while ago, and so I can see the full history here of changes we've made in this specific cell. To help us sanity check, you know, are these changes being made by the appropriate people in in the system, how they didn't verify by our superiors, so on and so forth. A nice way to reconcile the changes that we make through different iterations of our budget. Alright? Let's go ahead and check this task off here in the interest of time and go down to our target versus plan comparison. So here I can start to compare, you know, how are the changes I've made? How are they stacking up against, you know, my initial, target? Right? So I can see all the variances, how much we're over, under by. Here, I've made a note saying, you know, this we're over here in July because we've added one more head for headcount for, top line growth. So, So, again, I can also make make comments here. And, you know, keep in mind, all the comments I make here are collaborative. So I can see everyone's comments roll up to the very top. So this is simply looking at my sales north department. But if I were to come in as my superuser to, Teresa, she could come in at the total company level and then see everyone's comments across sales north, sales south, all my different departments or regions. Right? So that's the beauty of reporting. It's all collaborative. You don't have to compile different Excel sheets to see everyone's comments. It can all be done within one reporting tool. Okay. So let's check this task off as complete. There's nothing too material or super material that stands out. It's all within budget. We can go ahead now and submit the plan. So the final task here is to submit the plan. Obviously, it's in progress right now, but I can leave a note and say plan is ready for first pass check. And I can go ahead now and submit this plan, and this plan will be routed back to, Patrick O'Brien because Patrick is Angela's, boss in this case. And so Patrick will receive that task and be able to see all the changes Angela has made. Alright. So let's go ahead and submit the plan, check off the task as complete. Now let's come in as Patrick and see all the changes in the queue. Alright. So I'm in this Patrick O'Brien, again, director of FP and a. Angela rolls up to him. That's not Patrick is in charge of looking through all of Angela's, changes she's made the plan, you know, giving her the green light, maybe sending it back for corrections or amendments, and can continuing on with our budget process. So here, if I if I drop down on the task I've assigned out, I can see that, you know, Angela, right, that user you're just in as, she's completed her budget tasks. However, there's a number of other managers who we have to complete theirs. But I can start to go through and understand who's who's on changes to what, who's on who's on time for completion, and what percentage of my tasks here are are complete. Right? Now a way to assess the changes Angela has made would be to leverage a report. So if I come into my reports, I can take one of my, variance reports I've built, and and I can start to see, you know, what are the impacts of the changes Angela made to headcount, to training dollars, to expenses. Right? So this is what what we call here at Workday. We call this a web based variance report. And so this is simply built in the web. Again, this report is shareable with all of our users. You can share the report out with any user in adaptive. So he or she gets the same exact report. But, again, keep in mind, they will only have access to their respective levels. So in this case, I have complete company access. But if I share this out with Angela, she can only see that sales north department that she owns. Right? Anyway, so here we can check variances between our initial pass up plan, budget pass one, and the live working budget we're currently making changes. And And so as I go through, I can see all the impacts, if I filter actually for sales north. There we go. If I filter for sales north, the department Angela just made changes to, I can see all the variances for her specific department. Right? Anything related to the the increase we made to headcount. Right? The increase we made to training, and the impact we saw the telephone expense. Right? And we see that impact not just across the income statement, but across our balance sheet and our cash flow statement. So I can see how a small change that we made is impacting all of my company's financials, plus or minus. Right? And help us understand, are these changes that we're making the budget, are the trade offs, are are they within within, reasonable, amounts? Right? Are we are we good to pursue those changes, or do we send back to make, you know, fixes or amendments to plan? Okay. Now I can also take a report, and I can make changes or add new new new new columns here. Right? So let's take a different report. Let's look at our current month and the variance report. And now here again, I have those operating expenses, right, taking our actuals this time, comparing it to our working budget, again, with our collaborative commentary off to the side here. But maybe I wanna add in a holistic view, add in, revenue perhaps for top line. So, again, similar to dashboards as we saw earlier, I can bring in any account. Simply drag and drop onto my Canvas. So maybe I wanna bring in, let's bring in our revenue account first. So let's bring in revenue here. And then maybe I also wanna bring in my full time equivalents. So I can search for them or I can also just type in the account name if I know it. So I'll bring in my FTEs on board. And now maybe I wanna bring in a custom a custom calculation. Right? So instead of bringing in an account, I wanna bring in, a calculation perhaps. Right? A custom calculation where I can do some ratios, some formulas, build up some math. And so in this case, maybe I wanna I wanna explore, you know, what's the ratio of my revenue to FTEs. Right? How much revenue is every FTE I board I bring on board adding to my company? I can bring in the formula too. So I can use formula assistance to help create that formula. So now I wanna take my revenue and simply divide it by a number of FTEs on board. And, again, just just one of the many mathematical functions we can have here. We can have division, multiplication, additions, subtraction, views, dates, time streams, etcetera. But for now, we'll keep the simple. We'll do a simple division calculation. Hit okay. And now I can run this report with my new accounts I've added in. Right? So I can see more of a holistic view of my of my organization. And it's not just expenses, but I've got revenue across the top. My FTEs all on board for all my FTEs for this specific level? So here I have it for the total company. Maybe I wanna look at that north department I've been playing with all day, go into sales north, rerun the report, and just like that, it seamlessly updates just for that sales north territory. I can see who the hires are on board, any any new hires. Right? I can see my different revenue types by product revenue, services revenue, and that ratio. Right? The ratio I made for revenue to FTEs, what's that ratio look like, and start to be more analytical in my approach. Is it start to budget and and plan out for the year? Okay. Alright. How are we doing on chat? Any questions come in? Doing well? Yep. No questions so far. Alright. Cool. I got about ten minutes left here. Let's hop over into let's go in and quickly show here how we can create a new version given, you know, reaching that flexibility. It creates, versions, create new attributes dimension. So here in model management is where I would come in and create a new version. So as I saw earlier before, if we go back to my my main, menu here, dashboards. So all the versions are just iterations I have of my budget. Right? So right now, I'm in that live working budget here with prior iterations that I've had in the past. Now what if I wanna create a new version, and be able to share that with my with my team? I'll do that through model management here. So in model management, I come in, maybe take that live working budget I've been working on, and then simply create a a new plan. So when I create that new plan, I give it a name. Maybe we call this our our May forecast, and maybe we do a rolling forecast. Right? So it's a four plus eight, four months of actuals, eight months to go. I've got access controls too. Right? I can select, you know, who's gonna be able to view this version, who can make edits, right, who has access to to make changes or just have view only access. I can lock the version. Right, I have the option to create that running forecast so I can make my start plan be maybe May 1. Right? So we have four months of actuals plus eight months of budget numbers. I can indicate if I want the audit trail checked off so I can trace back changes. And the number of different other options I could choose and be able to copy scenarios or, you know, create shared formulas and shared rules. Right? So it's that simple to create a new version. Once you create it, it'll run-in a few minutes. And then when you come back to your your version, you'll be able to select it and see it right here. Okay? And, again, this is restricted to just admin users, so not everybody can come and create new new iterations. Right? Everybody can create new scenarios, but with the version, it's kind of limited to access for admins. Right? So we're not all going in and making changes at the same time. Alright. Last thing here before we wrap it up for the day is I wanna quickly get to OfficeConnect as well as promised. So OfficeConnect is our offline Excel functionality. Think of OfficeConnect as your web based report, but instead in the Excel interface. So I'm gonna log in to the same adaptive credentials I have. Won't update now. But I would log in through my same credentials I have for adaptive, and it's gonna mirror that same security you have in adaptive. So if you only have access to specific cost centers or departments, you'll only be able to see that same data in OfficeConnect. So all the data you see here is flowing in directly from my OfficeConnect tenants. So to visualize that, all my all my cells in blue or green are wired up to my model and adaptive, which means these are real time. If I make changes to my working budget or if I update my actuals and adaptive and I refresh my my sheet here, I will see those latest and greatest numbers come through. Now the best part of this is I can retain native Excel functionality. So I can retain those native Excel formulas for calculations. Maybe it's variance calculations. Maybe it's doing lookups, index matches, you know, etcetera, etcetera. I can retain all that functionality when working in Excel, and that's what a lot of our customers love to do as they transition from Excel into the world of adaptive. They like to retain some of that Excel interface, to help them feel comfortable first and foremost, but also, work in the environment that they're used to without having to, you know, completely change all their reporting views overnight. Now one thing I also wanna show here is, let's say we have our workbook here that we use every month to make changes to our charts, our metrics, our visualizations here. Now this is for February '26, but what if I wanna update it to March '26 without having to go through and repivot and repoint all of these views and charts, you know, every single time every month. So what I can do now is I can go to my workbook properties and simply roll forward my workbook date to the March. So if I do that, I'll roll this workbook forward to the March. I can hit okay. And what I can do now is I can refresh all of my all of my sheets. Right? When I refresh all my sheets, all my actuals, all my budget numbers get seamlessly updated across all my tabs. And as I scroll through now, I've got actuals through March. All of my, charts here have updated for March with the latest and greatest numbers. Now I don't have to go through every tab and piece together, or pull in new time, across the top of my columns. And the value here is, you know, when you're putting together a a slide deck for business partners every month or your ops reviews, you can have this ready in a minute versus going through the entire workbook and taking the data, update all the views and and visualizations. So, again, one of our fan favorites here, OfficeConnect. We also have OfficeConnect for PowerPoint and Microsoft Word that covers the entire Microsoft Office suites. And so maybe all the views I have here, I wanna put these in the PowerPoint as well. I could do that as well, and the PowerPoint will automatically reflect whatever is in Excel to give you those real time numbers, and help you, you know, save time on the mundane copy and pasting and instead focus on value added analysis, creating that, you know, variance commentary for your business partners. Alright. So as we wrap up here, hop back into the, the the slides real quick. So what you saw today, one, we saw a comprehensive planning tool to support strategic planning, a tool that's easy to use. Right? It's gonna help bring your people, your business partners, your plans all together on the one platform. Analysis is at your fingertips, right, via dashboards, web based reporting, interactive reports, or I can edit the report on the fly. I don't need to have an IT team or coding department maintain these for me. I can maintain these myself in the f t and a as we saw, bringing those accounts easily and seamlessly. And at the end, you saw a quick flavor of OfficeConnect. Again, it's our Excel plugin for Microsoft, to provide that real time analysis for all of our users in mind. Alright. And most of all, why this matters. Right? Like I said, it's gonna be time back for more strategic analysis. I think of it as, hey. Let's put the a back in the FP and A. Spend more time strategizing less time crunching numbers and creating slides and and, offline exercises and, ultimately, help you give answers back to to your business partners in a timely fashion. You know, we talked about unlimited scenarios, unlimited iterations. We saw some embedded AI through our anomaly detection. And then most of all, you know, be able to perform without compromise. If you go back to the Elastic HybridCube technology I I talked about at the start, we're able to deliver, you know, that power scale and flexibility without having to recreate dimensions every time or recreate levels or structures. It's a onetime exercise, and then it's applied all your different views and sheets and models. Alright. So that brings to the end of our one hour adaptive planning live session here. Here are some next steps if you're curious to learn more learn more about adaptive, planning what that offers, look at some of our customer stories, industry use cases. We even have recorded demos that provide further insight into some of the areas we touched on today. Feel free to share any feedback. Again, apologies for the for the hiccup we had halfway through, but I hope this was a great use of your time. You found something valuable from this, and, hopefully, it's getting you to ask more questions about adaptive and what I can do for you, going forward. Alright. So, again, thank you all for your time. Hope you had a good learning opportunity here, and look forward to hearing back or next steps.